Replication Data for: Transnationalism and Populist Networks in a Digital Era: Canada and the Freedom Convoy

The growth and success of right-wing populist movements globally has been remarkable since the early 2010s. Indeed, populist parties in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America have received tremendous electoral success, shaping a movement for the people and by the people within the political sphere. To what extent do populist movements influence other such programs across national borders? Research has suggested that globalization has facilitated the spread of populist ideology. Transnational populism emphasizes the “people” as a “horizontal, membership-based collective with membership premised on an in/out logic between nations, allowing populist national movements to engage and share a global ideological program. This paper seeks to understand and measure to what extent populism has become a transnational movement and identify how populism moves across national borders through online political participation. To explore this question, we collected over 6.7 million digital trace data on X/Twitter during Canada’s January–February 2022 Freedom Convoy movement. Receiving support from thousands of citizens, the Freedom Convoy revealed the ability of populist ideology to move aimlessly across international borders. We used a deep-learning model applied to text analysis to implement a classification task to measure populist narratives during the movement.

自2010年代初以来，全球右翼民粹主义运动的崛起与成就颇为瞩目。欧洲、亚洲、拉丁美洲及北美的民粹主义政党均斩获斐然选举成果，在政治领域打造了民有、民治的民众运动。那么，民粹主义运动在多大程度上会对跨境同类政治议程产生影响？已有研究表明，全球化推动了民粹主义意识形态的传播。跨国民粹主义（Transnational populism）将“民众”定义为“以横向会员制为基础的集体，其会员资格以国家间的内外准入逻辑为前提”，这使得各国民粹主义运动能够参与并共享全球意识形态纲领。本研究旨在厘清并量化民粹主义的跨国化程度，并探究其如何通过线上政治参与实现跨境传播。为解答该问题，我们采集了2022年1-2月加拿大“自由车队”运动期间，X平台（原Twitter）上的超670万条数字痕迹数据。该运动获得数千民众支持，凸显了民粹主义意识形态能够无阻碍跨境传播的特性。我们借助用于文本分析的深度学习模型完成分类任务，以量化该运动期间的民粹主义叙事内容。