Playing populist: the relationship of convenience between populist language and demarcationist ideological positions in the Italian parliament (1948-2020)

ABSTRACT

Populist language permeates political debate. While much has been said on the shape and colours of populism, less is known on its strategic use. This article offers a diachronic overview (1948–2020) of Italian deputies’ strategic use of populist language, by applying a novel dictionary to a new dataset on Italian parliamentary debates. Our analysis shows that populism has no single political colour, as left- and right-wing parties use it to a similar extent. Differently, populist claim-making is used more by parties with demarcationist ideological positions, as it is likely to reinforce the persuasiveness of their in-group/out-group thinking. Finally, it is used less by ruling parties, as their governing status asks them to adopt a more inclusive style of communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• political strategy
• communication style
• parliamentary debates
• automated text-analysis
• Italy

Acknowledgments

We presented early versions of this paper at seminars held at the 2022 Conference of the Italian Society of Political Science (SISP - Rome) and the 2023 Conference of the European Political Science Association (EPSA - Glasgow). We thank the discussants and the participants for their comments and feedback. We are grateful to Andrea Pedrazzani, Mariken van der Velden, and Mattia Zulianello for their helpful suggestions. Finally, we thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers: their detailed comments improved the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2024.2332048.

Notes

1. ‘Discursive’ and ‘ideological’ ideational approaches have so much in common that some authors resorted to consider them as equivalent: ‘Given that we see these differences as minor, we use the terms “discourse”, “ideology”, “outlook”, and “worldview” somewhat interchangeably’. (Hawkins and Kaltwasser 2017, p.514).

2. Defining and disentangling the concepts of sovereignism, (hard) euroscepticism and nationalism is beyond the scope of this paper. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that the core meaning of sovereignty is ‘supreme authority within a territory’ (Philpott 2020). Thus, sovereignism is defined as the call to recover at the national-level power that has slipped away to more distant layers of governance due to the processes of European integration and globalisation (Kallis, 2018, p. 299). In the EU context, the positions of sovereignist and (hard) eurosceptic political actors mostly overlap. Instead, sovereignism does not forcefully coincide with nationalism, as the borders of a sovereign state may not at all circumscribe a ‘nation’: sovereignism defines in-group membership based on individuals’ residence within borders, while nationalism adds ethno-, cultural- or socio-psychological aspects (Miscevic 2020).

3. Notice that sovereignist parties are not necessarily nativist, but both tend to locate on the TAN pole of the GAL-TAN dimension.

4. https://dati.camera.it/it/

5. See Appendix G for further empirical evidence on the use, in our corpus, of the phrase ‘Italiano medio’ as a synonym for the average citizen.

6. https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/.

7. https://timbro.se/

8. The original CMP dataset’s 56 categories have been extended to 68, to consider the Italian political context, e.g. parties’ positive/negative references to the Catholic Church.

9. Appendix F includes further details on the GAL-TAN scale’s components.

10. To test the robustness of our findings, in Appendix E we propose a regression model based on Kriesi (2010), with a GAL-TAN scale that includes free-trade and a RILE scale that includes issues pertaining to nationalism, patriotism and traditional morality. Results are analogous to those in Table 3.

11. During these years, the average level of GAL-TAN was −1.54, with a minimum of −12.57 (Futuro e Libertà per il Terzo Polo (FLPTP) – GAL pole) and a maximum of 3.85 (Northern League – TAN pole). The average level of NL was 2.8 and that of PdL and FdI was 3 during the same time period, thus positioning these parties on the very far TAN pole.

12. Populism sd = 0.16.

13. Robustness checks reported in Appendix C.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the University of Milan under the Project ‘POPULITE - POPUlist Language in ITalian political Elites’ (Call. Seal of Excellence (SoE) SEED 2020, Project ID: 1090, Principal Investigators: Fedra Negri and Andrea Ceron) and by the European Union - Next Generation EU and the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the PRIN 2022 Project ‘The Visual Politics of Populism’ [Project ID: 20222ERHBA, Principal Investigator: Mattia Zulianello].

Notes on contributors

Silvia Decadri

Silvia Decadri is Postdoctoral Researcher in political science at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca.

Fedra Negri

Fedra Negri is Assistant Professor in political science at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca.