FAQ
T_LOGIN Log in

Don't have an account on our website?

T_REGISTER Register

Keys to populism? Exploring varieties of mainstream populist discourse through key item analysis

Publication date: 30.04.2026

Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 21 (2026), Vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 19-46

https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.26.002.23411

Authors

,
Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau
Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4969-2039 Orcid
Contact with author
All publications →
Witold Kieraś
Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8062-5881 Orcid
Contact with author
All publications →

Titles

Keys to populism? Exploring varieties of mainstream populist discourse through key item analysis

Abstract

Despite extensive research, populism remains one of the most strongly contested concepts relating to political language. This study aims to contribute to its understanding by putting forward an approach to identifying markers of populist communication, which draws on the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies toolkit. In order to test the “populist Zeitgeist” hypothesis (Mudde, 2007), and to fill the gap in research on populism in Eastern Europe, this methodology is then applied to a corpus of Polish mainstream politicians’ election campaign speeches. The results point to the populist contagion, provide counter-evidence to the claims of a transitory nature of populism and show significant variation, despite the relatively subtle ideological differences between the analysed parties. This suggests that populism should not be considered merely as an attachment to a “host” (usually extreme) ideology, but rather as a complex discursive phenomenon in its own right.

References

Download references

Aiezza, M. C. (2019). #AmericaFirst vs #primagliitaliani: A corpus-assisted CDA of Trump’s and Salvini’s Twitter communications. In R. Breeze & A. M. Fernández Vallejo (Eds.), Politics and populism across modes and media (pp. 127–54). Peter Lang.

Albertazzi, D., & McDonnell, D. (Eds.) (2008). Twenty-first century populism: The spectre of Western European democracy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Borowiec, P. (2020). Populistyczne strategie – narzędzia polskich neoliberalnych elit w kampaniach wyborczych 2015 roku [Populist strategies—tools used by Polish neoliberał elites in the election campaigns of 2015]. Studia Politologiczne55, 191–211.

Borowiec, P. (2024). Populizm, dyskurs o populizmie w polskiej kampanii parlamentarnej 2023 roku. Dyskurs & Dialog14(14), 99–118.

Breeze, R. (2020). Angry tweets: A corpus-assisted study of anger in populist political discourse. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict8(1), 118–45.

Breeze, R., & Fernández Vallejo, A. M. (2019). Introduction: Politics, populism, media. In R. Breeze & A. M. Fernández Vallejo (Eds.), Politics and populism across modes and media (pp. 7–24). Peter Lang.

Dai, Y., & Kustov, A. (2022). When do politicians use populist rhetoric? Populism as a campaign gamble. Political Communication, 39(3), 383–404.

De Cleen, B. (2019). The populist political logic and the analysis of the discursive construction of “the people” and “the elite”. In J. Zienkowski & R. Breeze (Eds.), Imagining the peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum (pp. 19–42). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Demata, M., Conoscenti, M., & Stavrakakis, Y. (2020). Riding the populist wave: Metaphors of populism and anti-populism in the Daily Mail and The Guardian. Iperstoria15, 8–35.

Di Cocco, J., & Monechi, B. (2022). How populist are parties? Measuring degrees of populism in party manifestos using supervised machine learning. Political Analysis, 30(3), 311–27.

Ekström, M., & Morton, A. (2017). The performances of right-wing populism: Populist discourse‚ embodied styles and forms of news reporting. In M. Ekström & J. Firmstone (Eds.), The mediated politics of Europe (pp. 289–316). Palgrave Macmillan.

Ekström, M., Patrona, M., & Thornborrow, J. (2018). Right-wing populism and the dynamics of style: A discourse-analytic perspective on mediated political performances. Palgrave Communications4(1), 1–11.

Ernst, N., Engesser, S., Büchel, F., Blassnig, S., & Esser, F. (2017). Extreme parties and populism: An analysis of Facebook and Twitter across six countries. Information, Communication & Society20(9), 1347–64.

Gidron, N., & Bonikowski, B. (2013). Varieties of populism: Literature review and research agenda. Weatherhead Center for International Affairs13–0004, 1–38.

Hawkins, K. A., Aguilar, R., Silva, B. C., Jenne, E. K., Kocijan, B., & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2019). Measuring populist discourse: The global populism database. In EPSA Annual Conference in Belfast, UK, June 2019 (pp. 20–22).

Hofstadter, R. (1964). The paranoid style in American politics, and other essays. Knopf.

Kieraś, W., & Zawadzka-Paluektau, N. (2023). Słowa kluczowe w dyskursie polskiej polityki na przestrzeni stu lat [Key words in Polish political discourse over the last one hundred years]. Język Polski4, 36–51.

Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.

Moffitt, B., & Tormey, S. (2014). Rethinking populism: Politics, mediatisation and political style. Political Studies62(2), 381–97.

Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Napolitano, A. (2019). Achieving results for the American people: A corpus-assisted CDA of the White House website under Trump’s presidency. In R. Breeze & A. M. Fernández Vallejo (Eds.), Politics and populism across modes and media (pp. 79–104). Peter Lang.

Önnerfors, A. (2019). Performing “the people”? The populist style of politics in the German PEGIDA-movement. In J. Zienkowski & R. Breeze (Eds.), Imagining the peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum (pp. 173–200). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Pojanapunya, P., & Watson Todd, R. (2018). Log-likelihood and odds ratio: Keyness statistics for different purposes of keyword analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory14(1), 133–67.

Polk, J., Rovny, J., Bakker, R., Edwards, E., Hooghe, L., Jolly, S., Koedam, J., Kostelka, F., Marks, G., Schumacher, G., Steenbergen, M., Vachudova, M., & Zilovic, M. (2017). Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data. Research & Politics4(1), 1–9.

Radford, A., Kim, J. W., Xu, T., Brockman, G., Mcleavey, C., & Sutskever, I. (2023). Robust speech recognition via large-scale weak supervision. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (pp. 1–27).

Rooduijn, M., & Akkerman, T. (2017). Flank attacks: Populism and left-right radicalism in Western Europe. Party Politics23(3), 193–204.

Rooduijn, M., De Lange, S. L., & van der Brug, W. (2014). A populist Zeitgeist? Programmatic contagion by populist parties in Western Europe. Party Politics20(4), 563–75.

Rovenţa-Frumuşani, D., & Ștefănel, A. (2019). The populist contagion. The influence of populist discourses on the political communication of traditional parties in Romania. In R. Breeze & A. M. Fernández Vallejo (Eds.), Politics and populism across modes and media (pp. 155–80). Peter Lang.

Saputa, K., Tomaszewska, A., Zawadzka-Paluektau, N., Kieraś, W., & Kobyliński, Ł. (2023). Korpusomat.eu: A multilingual platform for effortless building and analysing linguistic corpora. In J. Mikyška, C. de Mulatier, M. Paszynski, V. V. Krzhizhanovskaya, J. J. Dongarra, & P. M. A. Sloot (Eds.), Computational Science – ICCS 2023. 23rd International Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, July 3–5, 2023, Proceedings, Part II (pp. 230–7). Springer Nature Switzerland.

Stanley, B. (2019). A new populist divide? Correspondences of supply and demand in the 2015 Polish parliamentary elections. East European Politics and Societies, 33(1), 17–43.

Stanley, B., & Cześnik, M. (2019). Populism in Poland. In D. Stockemer (Ed.), Populism around the world: A comparative perspective (pp. 67–88). Springer Nature Switzerland.

Stavrakakis, Y., Andreadis, I., & Katsambekis, G. (2017). A new populism index at work: Identifying populist candidates and parties in the contemporary Greek context. European Politics and Society18(4), 446–64.

Wilson, A. (2013). Embracing Bayes factors for key item analysis in corpus linguistics. In M. Bieswanger & A. Koll-Stobbe (Eds.), New approaches to the study of linguistic variability (pp. 3–11). Peter Lang.

Wrześniewska-Pietrzak, M., & Kołodziejczak, M. (2018). Knocking down the system. Populism in Paweł Kukiz’s political discourse. Ethnolinguistics/Etnolingwistyka29, 245–64.

Zienkowski, J., & Breeze, R. (2019). Introduction: Imagining populism and the peoples of Europe. In J. Zienkowski & R. Breeze (Eds.), Imagining the peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum (pp. 1–18). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Information

Information: Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 21 (2026), Vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 19-46

Article type: Original scientific article

Titles:

English: Keys to populism? Exploring varieties of mainstream populist discourse through key item analysis

Authors

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4969-2039

Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau
Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4969-2039 Orcid
Contact with author
All publications →

Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences
Poland

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8062-5881

Witold Kieraś
Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8062-5881 Orcid
Contact with author
All publications →

Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences
Poland

Published at: 30.04.2026

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY 4.0  licence icon

Percentage share of authors:

Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau (Author) - 50%
Witold Kieraś (Author) - 50%

Article corrections:

-

Publication languages:

English

Keys to populism? Exploring varieties of mainstream populist discourse through key item analysis

quote

download files

RIS BIB ENDNOTE