Measuring Populism: A Quantitative Text Analysis of Party Literature in Belgium

Abstract

Despite the increased use of the term populism in vernacular and scholarly language, the measurement of the concept has long been neglected. The label is often attached to a certain party without any justification. Minimal definitions are alternatives but lack rigor. Classical content analyses provide more systematic measurements of populism but are extremely resource hungry. This article proposes an alternative, quantitative text analysis to measure the degree of populism among Belgian parties, drawing on both internally and externally oriented party literature. The results confirm that usual suspects such as the Vlaams Belang or Lijst Dedecker are the most populist of all parties under study. Populism turns out not to be an “either–or” concept, however, since we also identify a moderately populist party. It is furthermore demonstrated how populism can be attached to other ideologies, such as the radical right and (neo)liberalism. A cross‐validation of the proposed method with independent voter survey data confirms its validity. This article concludes that a quantitative text analysis might be a promising method to measure populism over time and space without the huge costs of hand coding.