WER IST DAS VOLK? In- and outgroups of populist political communication

Despite the lacking unanimity regarding the definition of populism, there is consensus that the concept is fundamentally connected to one core feature: the people. However, the identity of the people is not a priori fixed, but rather an empty vessel that allows populist actors to construct their own people. Scholars, however, are confronted with the puzzle, who actually belongs to this in-group and who does not, i.e. who constitutes the out-group(s). Previous research often lacks knowledge about the identity of this central attribute of populism and has rather solely focused on the people’s counterparts. In order to test theoretical expectations about the identity and construction of in- and outgroups, I combine several innovative methods: First, I extract terms that refer to the people using word embeddings, which allow for identifying terms with similar meanings. Secondly, I analyse the sentiment in which these terms appear, i.e. if the reference is positive (for ingroups) or negative (for outgroups). The final outcome is a dictionary, which is able to compute the share of terms used for reference to the people and their antagonists in large amounts of texts. I apply this dictionary to election manifestos from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (1983-2019), thus detecting the in- and outgroups of populist political communication. Knowledge about the main attributes of populism, including the way the people as the central concept are approached, is crucial for political scientists’ understanding of populism’s impact on modern liberal democracies.