Replication Data for: When Do Politicians Use Populist Rhetoric? Populism as a Campaign Gamble

Why do some politicians employ populist rhetoric more than others within the same elections, and why do the same politicians employ more of it in some elections? Building on a simple formal theoretical model of two-candidate elections informed by the ideational approach to populist communication, we argue that the initially less popular political actors are more likely to use populist rhetoric in a gamble to have at least some chance of winning. To test the empirical implications of our argument, we construct the most comprehensive corpus of U.S. presidential campaign speeches (1952-2016) and estimate the prevalence of populist rhetoric across these speeches with a novel automated text analysis method utilizing active learning and word embedding. Overall, we show the robustly greater use of populism among the presidential candidates with the lower polling numbers regardless of their partisanship or incumbency status.

为何在同一场选举中，部分政治家比其他政治家更频繁地使用民粹主义修辞？又为何同一位政治家在部分选举中会更多采用此类修辞？本研究依托以民粹主义传播观念路径为理论指引的两候选人选举简单正式理论模型，提出核心论点：初始民调支持度较低的政治行为体，更有可能为博取至少一丝胜选机会而冒险使用民粹主义修辞。为验证该论点的实证意涵，我们构建了1952年至2016年美国总统竞选演讲的迄今最全面语料库（corpus），并运用结合主动学习（active learning）与词嵌入（word embedding）的新型自动化文本分析方法，估算了所有演讲中民粹主义修辞的使用频率。整体而言，本研究证实：无论党派属性与现任身份如何，民调支持率较低的总统候选人均会显著且稳健地更频繁地使用民粹主义言论。