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Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 315–339

Chapter 12
Measuring people-centrism in populist political discourse

A linguistic approach

In recent years, a growing body of political-scientific literature has focused on the empirical measurement of populism. In such studies, “people-centrism” is one of the most frequently analysed discourse characteristics, i.e. to what extent “the people” are put in the focus of attention in a politician’s discourse. In order to measure people-centrism empirically, it is common practice to use the number of references to the electorate as the only indicator. In this contribution, however, I argue that the way in which politicians refer to “the people” should be taken into account as well. By presenting a case study from Dutch politics, in which the populist Geert Wilders plays an important role, I substantiate that analysing the syntactic position in which “the people” are presented and the strategic use of perspective or attributed viewpoint deepens our understanding of how (populist) politicians put “the people” in the centre of attention in their discourse. As such this contribution also aims to demonstrate how a linguistic approach to populism can contribute to the empirical measurement of populism.

Keywords: people-centrism, measuring populism, linguistic choices, Geert Wilders, Alexander Pechtold
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Geert Wilders and Alexander Pechtold and the general debates of 2008 and 2009
  • Referring to “the people” or not
  • Presenting “the people” in subject, complement or adjunct position
    • Syntactic position and prominence of information
    • Syntactic position of “the people” in Wilders’ and Pechtold’s speeches
  • The use of perspective
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.13lee
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