Performing_the_People_Corpus_2016-2021

Version 2.0 (October 2025). This update includes normalized frequency tables, an expanded annotation workbook, and improved metadata traceability for the nine speeches analyzed in Performing the People: Affective and Discursive Strategies of Populist Proximity. This dataset contains a curated corpus of nine political speeches by three prominent right-wing populist leaders: Nigel Farage (United Kingdom), Marine Le Pen (France), and Santiago Abascal (Spain). The corpus was compiled for the study “Performing the People: Affective and Discursive Strategies of Populist Proximity”, currently under review at Corpus Pragmatics. Speeches were selected through purposive sampling (Teddlie & Yu, 2007), targeting moments of informal, conversational, or semi-scripted political communication where interpersonal alignment is foregrounded. Events include campaign rallies, mass rallies, local rallies, an EP intervention, and a closing rally. Selection criteria included: Reduced institutional formality (e.g., absence of lecterns, direct audience engagement) High emotional or affiliative load (visible empathy, humour, personal storytelling) Verbal markers of intimacy (“you know,” “people like us,” “I feel”) Availability of audiovisual documentation for multimodal annotation For each speech, the dataset includes: Full verbatim transcript in UTF-8 plain text (.txt) Metadata file (.csv) with title, date, event type, language, word count, duration, and source link Sources & Links text file listing all YouTube URLs README file with corpus description and citation guidelines Languages: English, French, SpanishTime span: 2016–2021Total speeches: 9 (3 per leader) Researchers can use this dataset for qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis, stance-taking studies, political communication, multimodal analysis, and cross-cultural rhetoric comparisons. Keywords: populism, political discourse, corpus linguistics, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Santiago Abascal, stance-taking, affective discourse, pronominal deixis, stylistic populism Funding: NoneLicense: CC BY 4.0 (Attribution required)Cite as: Artero Abellan, P. A. (2025). Performing the People: Corpus of Populist Political Speeches, 2016–2021 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16787714