Language Complexity in Populist Rhetoric

Abstract

Research suggests that politicians labeled as populists tend to use simpler language than their mainstream opponents. Yet, the metrics traditionally employed to assess the complexity of their language do not show consistent and generalizable results across different datasets and languages. This inconsistencies raise questions about the claimed simplicity of populist discourse, suggesting that the issue may be more nuanced than it initially seemed. To address this topic, we analyze the linguistic profile of IMPAQTS, a dataset of transcribed Italian political speeches, to identify linguistic features differentiating populist and non-populist parties. Our methodology ensures comparability of political texts and combines various statistical analyses to reliably identify key linguistic characteristics to test our case study. Results show that the “simplistic” language features previously described in the literature are not robust predictors of populism. This suggests that the characteristics defining populist statements are highly dependent on the specific dataset and the language being analysed, thus limiting the conclusions drawn in previous research. In our study, various linguistic features statistically differentiate between populist and mainstream parties, indicating that populists tend to employ specific well-known rhetorical strategies more frequently; however, none of them strongly indicate that populist parties use simpler language.