Is Chávez Populist?: Measuring Populist Discourse in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This article pushes forward our understanding of populism by developing one of the more underappreciated definitions of populism, populism as discourse. It does so by creating a quantitative measure of populist discourse suitable for cross-country and historical analysis. The article starts by laying out the discursive definition of populism in the context of existing definitions. It then operationalizes this definition through a holistic grading of speeches by current chief executives and a few historical figures. The result is a data set of elite-level populist discourse in more than 40 current and past governments from a variety of countries across the world, with special focus on Latin America. This measurement has high reliability comparable to standard human-coded content analysis, compares well to common understandings of actual cases of populism, and is a reasonably efficient technique even in small samples.