Politics as Usual? Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020) with Neural Language Models

Abstract

Radical-right campaigns commonly employ three discursive elements: anti-elite populism, exclusionary and declinist nationalism, and authoritarianism. Recent scholarship has explored whether these frames have diffused from radical-right to centrist parties in the latter’s effort to compete for the former’s voters. This study instead investigates whether similar frames had been used by mainstream political actors prior to their exploitation by the radical right (in the U.S., Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns). To do so, we identify instances of populism, nationalism (i.e., exclusionary and inclusive definitions of national symbolic boundaries and displays of low and high national pride), and authoritarianism in the speeches of Democratic and Republican presidential nominees between 1952 and 2020. These frames are subtle, infrequent, and polysemic, which makes their measurement difficult. We overcome this by leveraging the affordances of neural language models—in particular, a robustly optimized variant of bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (RoBERTa) and active learning. As we demonstrate, this approach is more effective for measuring discursive frames than other methods commonly used by social scientists. Our results suggest that what set Donald Trump’s campaign apart from those of mainstream presidential candidates was not the invention of a new form of politics, but the combination of negative evaluations of elites, low national pride, and authoritarianism—all of which had long been present among both parties—with an explicit evocation of exclusionary nationalism, which had been articulated only implicitly by prior presidential nominees. Radical-right discourse—at least at the presidential level in the United States—should therefore be characterized not as a break with the past but as an amplification and creative rearrangement of existing political-cultural tropes.

A Systematic Evaluation of Text Mining Methods for Short Texts: Mapping Individuals’ Internal States from Online Posts

“…We find that advanced supervised machine learning classification methods using transformer language models can approach the performance of human analysis when it comes to inference on various internal states from short texts. Our results, thus, echo recent suggestions about the potential of deep learning methods in social science applications (van Atteveldt et al 2021;Bonikowski, Luo, and Stuhler 2022;Do, Ollion, and Shen 2022;Widmann and Wich 2022). Yet, we also suggest that increased method complexity does not always warrant a large improvement in performancesimple supervised machine learning methods such as logistic regression can sometimes perform almost as well as more complex algorithms.…”

Mating Call, Dog Whistle, Trigger: Asymmetric Alignments, Race, and the Use of Reactionary Religious Rhetoric in American Politics

“…This can reduce voter participation when elections are uncompetitive due to districting. But this can also raise the stakes of competitive elections, demanding aggressive campaigning that is often not tied to issues of governance (Bonikowski et al 2022; Bonikowski and Stuhler 2022; Bonikowski and Zhang 2023). Flowing from this, the second stable condition is that voter persuasion in competitive races is heavily tied to identity and emotion, specifically anger and fear (Achen and Bartels 2016; Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015; Tannenbaum et al 2015; Valentino et al 2011; Weber 2013).…”

“…Indeed, following their 2012 presidential election loss, the GOP’s in-house “autopsy” took stock of demographic realities and recommended the GOP become more diverse and inclusive as a party (Growth and Opportunity Project 2012). Instead, Republican leadership decided to leverage the growing alignments of ideological, religious, and racial identification that created an aggrieved population of Americans who believed their status was increasingly threatened under the first Black president (Bonikowski et al 2022; Braunstein 2021; Hochschild 2018; McVeigh and Estep 2019). Increasing secularization has both hollowed out the explicitly religious content of religious identity, thus altering the content of religious appeals (Astor and Mayrl 2020), and left individuals with conservative Christian identities to feel increasingly threatened by ethno-religious outsiders, thus further incentivizing culture war rhetoric.…”

“…Even more, the content itself is evolving from more abstract and ecumenical to more sectarian and reactionary, even identitarian (Braunstein 2017a; Hughes 2020; Neumann and Geary 2019). And though political rhetoric has always been suffused with references to religious, racial, and national identity (Gorski and Perry 2022), shifting cultural, demographic, and political realities are creating a novel national context facilitating new configurations of identity-based appeals (Bonikowski, Luo, and Stuhler 2022).…”

Mating Call, Dog Whistle, Trigger: Assymetric Alignments, Race, and the Use of Reactionary Religious Rhetoric in American Politics

“…Even more, the content itself is evolving from more abstract and ecumenical to more sectarian and reactionary, even identitarian (Braunstein 2017a;Hughes 2020;Neumann and Geary 2019). And though political rhetoric always been suffused with references to religious, racial, and national identity (Gorski and Perry 2022), shifting cultural, demographic, and political realities are creating a novel national context facilitating new configurations of identity-based appeals (Bonikowski, Luo, and Stuhler 2022).…”