Populist Rhetoric In Political Research

This research article by Pollock, Borock and Ellison (2015) explores the idea that current young voters are - although mixed in their political positions - greatly influenced by the ideology of populism. The article sets out to demonstrate that young people employ populist rhetoric in expressing notions that are representative of a specific context or location. In order to do this, a survey was conducted on sample groups in 14 countries. The questions were designed to gain better understanding of which of the different features of populism (including cynicism and xenophobia) are most taken up by young people. This kind of positivist method is widely used in political research as it is an extremely useful tool to determine patterns within the political world and come up with generalisations through the use of …show more content…
The research focused on two ‘dictionaries’: “political populism” - words and phrases such as ‘lobbyists’ and ‘the system’- and “economic populism” - e.g. ’big banks’ and ‘the rich/wealthy’ - with the word ‘elites’ being included in both. The frequency of these words and phrases in campaign speeches was then measured to compare each candidate’s rate of anti-establishment language. Discourse analysis is an interpretivist, qualitative method which focuses on the role language has in shaping the political world. This is a context specific technique with an ability to uncover unidentified features of human behaviour. However, positivists would argue that, due to language being open to interpretation, discourse analysis is unable to provide definite answers and therefore lacks the necessary objectivity. It follows another research tool might have been more effective in establishing whether - and to what extent - populist rhetoric and ideologies were influential in the 2016 US general