Populism in German mainstream parties: A dictionary approach on subnational parliaments

The paper is concerned with mainstream parties’ response to the rise of populism. I investigate the effect of electoral performance of populist parties on the degree of populist rhetoric in parliamentary speeches of mainstream parties. I apply an existing dictionary-based approach for the measurement of the degree of populism in the German language on parliamentary speeches from German subnational parliaments. Based on spatial theory and existing empirical works, I expect that the electoral performance of populist parties as well as mainstream parties’ office loss have a significant effect on the level of populism among established parties. While theory supports a possible effect of vote loss on the degree of populist communication among the mainstream, prior empirical research was not able to produce conclusive results on this effect. I aim to produce clearer results through the utilization of a new dataset of subnational parliaments, providing the basis for a larger case study.