Let’s Talk About It: Reconciling Deliberative and Populist Analyses of Democratic Discourses

Deliberative scholars hold an essentially “talk-based” approach and argue that rational, inclusive, respectful, and consensus-oriented communication is crucial to democratic quality. Recently, a branch of populism scholars gravitates towards a conceptualization of “populism” as a set of ideas that manifests itself in political rhetoric. In line with the so-called ideational approach to populism, populist discourse is grounded in a Manichean portrayal of the divide between the pure and good people and the evil and corrupt elite. The resulting “us versus them”- message may fuel conflict and polarization, and is therefore often perceived as a threat to (mainly liberal) democratic ideals such as pluralism and the protection of minority rights. Consequently, populist rhetoric is frequently considered as “the antithesis of deliberation” and as a “pathology” of normatively valuable democratic reason-giving (Curato et al. 2018). Our paper takes both analytical perspectives as a point of departure and aims at reconciling them for a comparative analysis of contemporary discourses communicative patterns. The first part of the paper addresses the conceptualization and operationalization of deliberative and populist communication. It aims at deriving theoretically grounded communicative profiles by answering two questions: (a) Which concepts of “deliberative” and “populist” communication are at the core of contemporary theoretical and conceptual debates? (b) How can they be operationalized, i.e. which empirically identifiable characteristics of populist and deliberative communicative patterns can be deduced from these concepts? On this basis, the second part of the paper aims at constructing a way to measure and compare both profiles and assesses them in exemplary real world-discourses (case selection pending). In this section, we build on recent empirical endeavors to measure populism and deliberative quality in political leaders’ speeches by means of textual analyses: We capitalize on ample datasets (including raw speech data) published on the website of the Team Populism network (https://populism.byu.edu/; covering data from Latin America and Europe) and employ qualitative text analysis techniques to measure the populist and deliberative communication patterns identified in the first section (e.g., Aslanidis 2018; Jagers and Walgrave 2007). The concluding section discusses the results of our analysis against the background of existing textual analyses of populism and deliberativeness in public discourses. We argue that in combining the concepts and methodological tools of populism and deliberation scholars, it is possible to provide a more fine-grained assessment of contemporary discourses patterns. We stress the potential of this “reconciliation” of analytical perspectives for a more differentiated evaluation of contemporary discourses’ development and the corresponding challenges liberal democracies are currently confronted with. Aslanidis, P. (2018). Measuring populist discourse with semantic text analysis: an application on grassroots populist mobilization. Quality & Quantity, 52(3), 1241-1263. Curato, N., Hammond, M. & Min, J.B. (2018). Power in Deliberative Democracy: Norms, Forums, Systems. Palgrave. Jagers, J., & Walgrave, S. (2007). Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties' discourse in Belgium. European Journal of Political Research, 46(3), 319-345.