Text-as-data and the exploration of populist actors at the European Union level

Text-as-data makes inroads in political science and adjacent disciplines as an innovative methodological approach combining the deep analysis of interpretive methods with a systematic, reliable, and generalizable inquiry. This paper explores the potential of the interdisciplinary field of text-as-data for the study of populist actors at the European Union (EU) level. The study of populist actors on their supply side, that is, their ideologies, discourse, programs, is often confined to the exploration of party manifestos or punctual speeches by party leaders. Text-as-data approaches increase the potential to automatically collect large sets of textual documents, and in subsequent steps clean, compile, and analyse them in a systematic way. The various text-as-data techniques also allow us to visualize relations between categories or concepts representing those texts or sets of texts, or some units or actors within the texts. In this paper, we introduce the main advantages of text-as-data and its various techniques and present the potential contribution that this methodological approach may offer to the study of populist actors at the EU level.