Revealed: the rise and rise of populist rhetoric

A two-decade surge in populist rhetoric that has upended the global political landscape can be revealed for the first time after the Guardian commissioned a study of speeches by almost 140 world leaders.

The research, which is based on analysis of public addresses by prime ministers, presidents and chancellors in 40 countries, suggests the number of populist leaders has more than doubled since the early 2000s.

It also reveals how politicians across the globe have gradually adopted more populist arguments, framing politics as a Manichean battle between the will of ordinary people and corrupt, self-serving elites.

The project was overseen by Team Populism, a global network of political scientists who have pioneered the use of “textual analysis” in populism studies. Their research is compiled in the Global Populism Database, the most comprehensive and reliable tracker of populist discourse in the world.

Leaders ranked 4

Each leader was given an average populism “score”, based on the extent to which speeches contained populist ideas. The data pinpoints populist discourse by leaders in all the largest countries in Europe and the Americas, as well as India. Researchers graded their speeches on a 0-2 scale, ranging from not populist to very populist.

The average populism score, across all 40 countries, has doubled from 0.2 in the early 2000s to around 0.4 today. The number of countries with leaders classified as at least “somewhat” populist – a score of 0.5 and above – has also doubled in that period, from seven in 2004, to around 14 in recent years.

The study also highlights the trajectory of individual countries, such as Venezuela, where very high levels of populist discourse persisted as Hugo Chávez – the most populist leader in the database – was succeeded by president by Nicolas Maduro.

That contrasts with countries like India, the US, Mexico and Brazil, where leaders rarely used any populist rhetoric until recent elections, when the successful prime ministerial or presidential candidate transformed the terms of debate.

The nature of the rise in populist rhetoric is brought into focus when the size of affected countries is considered. In the early 2000s, Venezuela, Argentina and Italy were the only countries with populations larger than 20 million with populist leaders.

The populist club increased significantly between 2006 and 2009, when Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and the Czech Republic’s Mirek Topolánek came to power – and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin began using populist rhetoric.

The most significant expansion, however, has occurred in the last five years, when more populists came to power in central and eastern Europe, and the elections of Donald Trump, India’s Narendra Modi, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro put populists in power in some of the world’s most populous countries.

Kirk Hawkins, an associate professor at Brigham Young University who led the research study, said: “There have been waves of populism throughout the past 250 years, and in countries such as the United States populism is actually fairly common in third-party movements. But much of Europe and North America are experiencing a wave that for these countries is new.” He added: “It’s extraordinary to see their levels of populism beginning to approach what we see in, say, Latin America.”

Funded by theguardian.org, a US-based non-profit, Hawkins trained 46 paid researchers to identify populist discourse in speeches in 13 different languages. They analysed four speeches for each leader’s term in office, and an average was taken for an overall populism score.

The results were combined with previous speech-analysis to build the Global Populism Database, which will be made public in the coming days. It will be an open resource for academics, journalists and policy-makers who wish to study populism.

Three-quarters of leaders in the database, including Poland’s Donald Tusk, the UK’s David Cameron, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Germany’s Angela Merkel, were classified as “not populist”.

Others were divided into moderately or “somewhat populist” leaders like Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi; “populist” leaders like the Czech Republic’s Topolánek; and “very populist” leaders, a band dominated by Latin American leftists like Chávez, Maduro, Morales and Correa.

The data also serves as an antidote to often overstated claims about a populist tsunami – putting into context the rise of leaders like Trump, Modi and Bolsonaro, all of whom were classified as only “somewhat populist”.

Erdoğan was the only non-Latin American leader to warrant a “very populist” label on the basis of the speech-analysis, and the only rightwing leader to reach that level of populist discourse. In a sign of how much the Turkish leader has changed during his 16 year years at the helm of his country’s political system, Erdoğan was classified as “not populist” when he first came to power in 2003.

Vladimir Putin similarly only appears to have begun giving moderately populist speeches around 2008, when he stood down as president and assumed the role of Russian prime minister. The same is true of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was not populist during his first term, which ended in 2002, but after returning to power in 2010 he became one of Europe’s most populist prime ministers.

Measured through the speeches of its leaders, Turkey has undergone the largest increase in populist rhetoric of any of the 40 countries, followed by Bolivia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Poland, El Salvador and the United States. Only two leaders – Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Bulgaria’s Boyko Borisov – have bucked the wider trend and become less populist over consecutive terms.

The research finds leftwing politicians on average scored slightly higher for populism in their speeches, at 0.4, than their right-wing and centrist counterparts, 0.3. The study also confirms that Latin American varieties of populism tend to be socialist, whereas populists in Europe are more likely to be right-wing.

Of the 46 leaders’ terms that were categorised as at least moderately populist, 26 were Latin American, most of which were leftwing. There were 18 European leader terms that were at least moderately populist, most of which were right wing. It is unusual to find centrist populists, however some leaders in the database, such as Italy’s current prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, defied easy categorisation on a left-right scale and were listed as “neither”.

Overall, 15 countries in the database have experienced a significant overall increase in populist discourse over the two decade period, compared with just four that experienced a similar decline in populist rhetoric in that period.

While several countries in the early 2000s were run by leaders that were at least moderately populist, most were smaller states like Ecuador, Latvia, Paraguay and Croatia. Today the list includes several much larger countries like Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, India, Russia and the US.

As a result, the number of people living in a country in the database led by a leader that is at least somewhat populist has increased from 120 million 17 years ago to more than 2 billion today.

The research also puts a spotlight on 15 countries, many in western Europe, which have never had a leader that uses populist rhetoric during the last two decades. They include Germany, Norway, Sweden, Uruguay, Chile, France, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands and Canada.

That is not to say these countries have not been impacted by populist discourse. Research conducted by the Guardian and 30 leading political scientists in November revealed the share of votes going to populist political parties has more than tripled since 1998, helping rightwing populists gain ministerial posts in countries like Austria, Norway and Finland.

Perhaps the most intriguing data in the speech-analysis, however, relates to the UK. A succession of prime ministers, including Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, all scored very low scores on the populism scale. However, the average populism score given to Theresa May was 0.5, nudging her into the lower end of the same band of “somewhat populist” leaders that includes Trump, Modi, Orbán, Putin and Bolsonaro.

The Global Populism Database consists of research conducted by Team Populism and Central European University’s Comparative Populism project. The full methodology behind the research is available here.