Language Complexity in Populist Rhetoric (2024)

Abstract: Research suggests that politicians labeled as populists tend to use simpler language than their mainstream opponents. Yet, the metrics traditionally employed to assess the complexity of their language do not show consistent and generalizable results across different datasets and languages. This inconsistencies raise questions about the claimed simplicity of populist discourse, suggesting that the issue may be more nuanced than it initially seemed. To address this topic, we analyze the linguistic profile of IMPAQTS, a dataset of transcribed Italian political speeches, to identify linguistic features differentiating populist and non-populist parties. Our methodology ensures comparability of political texts and combines various statistical analyses to reliably identify key linguistic characteristics to test our case study. Results show that the “simplistic” language features previously described in the literature are not robust predictors of populism. This suggests that the characteristics defining populist statements are highly dependent on the specific dataset and the language being analysed, thus limiting the conclusions drawn in previous research. In our study, various linguistic features statistically differentiate between populist and mainstream parties, indicating that populists tend to employ specific well-known rhetorical strategies more frequently; however, none of them strongly indicate that populist parties use simpler language.

## introduction the concept of populism has gained a huge focus in social sciences, with different scholars attempting to systematically analyse the phenomenon to understand its core components (e.g., @xcite @xcite . for instance, inspired by the social identity theory of @xcite , different studies have employed natural language processing (nlp) techniques to studying social group appeals foot_0 in political texts @xcite @xcite . several studies have explored the rhetorical power of identity appeals to citizens and their effects on voting behavior (e.g., @xcite @xcite . this rhetorical power is evident especially when focusing on populist communication, where the tendency to appeal to "the people" is considered a universal component of all different realizations of populism @xcite . populist parties divide society in two groups: "pure people" and "corrupt elite" and advocate for politics to represent the general will of the people @xcite . therefore, language complexity becomes both an important characteristic of populist communication, as well as a tool for appealing to a broader public of ordinary people @xcite . this assumption lies on the idea that "the people" are less-educated and therefore speak simpler. simple language helps citizens to better understand political positions @xcite , and scholars claim populists use it to convey their simplistic message and strengthen their positions as part of "the people" @xcite @xcite . thus, to describe populist language, different researchers have analysed political texts throughout syntactic and lexical features like readability scores, typetoken ratio analysis, and dictionary approaches @xcite , showing that populist parties generally employ simpler language than their mainstream opponents. however, different studies have highlighted very diverse patterns in the language of populism, questioning the validity of using lan-guage complexity as a distinguishing feature for populism. @xcite . in this paper, we investigate what are the distinctive features that set populist from non-populist parties apart. compared to existing studies, our analysis focuses on speeches within the italian political arena, extracted from the impaqts corpus @xcite . we categorized the discourses in impaqts as either populist or non-populist given the political affiliations of the speakers, as outlined in previous research such as @xcite . the categorization of populist and non-populist parties rely on the classification from "the populist 3.0" @xcite . our main contributions are: (i) we challenge the prevailing notion that populism is characterized by simpler language; and (ii) we identify specific linguistic features that indicate a tendency in using well-known rhetorical strategies; (iii) we propose a systematic approach to empirically select linguistic features that differentiate populist and non-populist discourses in our dataset. ## related work scholars investigate how populist politicians influence the public opinion via their discourses @xcite . among the different definitions of populism, the division of society in two groups, namely the "pure people" and the "corrupt elite", is considered a universal feature of all populist parties @xcite . this is the definition we adopt in our research. several studies measure populism in text by looking at how and to whom populists refer in their discourses @xcite @xcite . in this way, they show how the indexing of people and the anti-establishment rhetoric are typical characteristics of populist communication. for instance, @xcite and decadri and boussalis (2020) conduct a semi-automatic content analysis using dictionaries of words related to populist rhetoric, such as citizen, people, caste, elite. ## data in this section, we describe the dataset used for our analysis and we illustrate the criteria of classification of populist and non-populist parties. ## methodology analyzing language involves dealing with several challenges, like the need for selecting among a vast number of features and the strong collinearity between different language features. in this section, we present the main features used in our analysis and the control features used to guarantee the comparability of the different texts. then, we illustrate the feature selection procedure and the logistic regression models used to assess the statistical significance of the selected features. ## discussion our analysis of multiple linguistic features yields several insights. first, traditional language complexity features identified in populism research do not robustly transfer to our data, often failing to distinguish populist discourse effectively. this suggests that the characteristics defining populist statements are highly dependent on the specific dataset and the language analysed, thus limiting the general conclusions drawn in previous research. second, our feature selection revealed interesting trends when comparing populist vs. non-populist parties, particularly the well-known difference in the use of populist words. according to the literature, populists often emphasize a dichotomy between "the people" and "the elite" to rally support @xcite . the most significant features also indicate a much wider use of proper nouns and quantifiers such as "all" and "both" as predeterminers by populist parties. this could imply a tendency to make absolute statements and to generalize broadly, reinforcing the populist narrative of representing the entire population against a unified elite, as exemplified in our corpus by sentence (1). moreover, lexical density is significant in showing that populists use more content words. how-ever, while populists use fewer adjectives, they tend to use proper nouns and second-person singular verbs more consistently. this might suggest a focus on specific individuals or groups and direct engagement with the audience, respectively. additionally, populists use fewer verbal roots to structure their sentences, potentially indicating a reliance on more direct and straightforward statements. when controlling for authors' effects, all these features lose significance, indicating huge variance in politicians' communication styles. only four features remain significant after accounting for authors' effects. in impaqts, we observe a trend among populist parties to use conditional verbs less frequently, potentially indicating a preference for stronger epistemic modality. for example, in our corpus, non-populists might prefer statements that convey less epistemic strength, as exemplified by sentence (2), which clearly conveys less certainty compared to a straightforward statement like 'we want to say something'. we also observe that populists use fewer finite verbs, implying a greater use of non-finite verbal forms. we notice a consistent use of nominalizations with non-finite verbs as the syntactic head of noun phrases, as exemplified by sentence (3). in adult speech, nominalization facilitates abstractness, which creates a sense of detachment and allows events to be presented as undeniable facts @xcite . finally, the use of subordinate clauses in chains of four shows a tendency for populists to employ repetitions in their sentences, as in sentence ( 5 ). this technique emphasizes the key points and creates a memorable rhythm, akin to the well-known rhetorical strategy known as the "rule of three" @xcite . overall, our models do not strongly suggest that populist parties use simpler language than their mainstream rivals. we argue that substantial differences can be found in the simplicity of the conveyed content, more than in the simplicity of the language used to convey it, as discussed in @xcite . instead, our results suggest that populists adhere more to specific, wellknown rhetorical strategies, making populism a communication strategy that is common to very diverse parties and politicians. indeed, in our corpus, sentence (6) is the perfect example of a combination of the above characteristics. the use of copular "be" conveys a stronger epistemic modality and affirms the undeniability of the stated facts, while the repetitions in the sentence help to emphasize key points and create a memorable rhythm. ## conclusion and future work in our analysis of the linguistic characteristics of italian political speeches, we implemented a detailed methodology to ensure the comparability of texts and utilized a feature selection process to explore linguistic differences among populists and non-populists parties. our study reveals that traditionally employed features of language complexity derived from the literature do not show statistical significance in distinguish populist and nonpopulist discourse in the impaqts corpus. this inconsistency underscores the importance of context and corpus specificity in linguistic analyses, cautioning against overgeneralizing findings. moreover, while we observed an increased occurrence of populist rhetoric -characterized by themes of people-centrism and anti-elitism-in speeches from aggregating populist parties, this did not coincide with simpler language use. especially, most of these features were not robust to the individuality of speakers communication style within our dataset. we highlight the tendency of populists' speaker to employ specific, well-known rhetorical strategies in their speeches. however, our research highlights again the need for nuanced analysis that considers the diverse characteristics of the corpus being studied. building on this foundation, future research will aim to enhance the granularity of populism annotation in textual data, following approaches like those outlined by @xcite . additionally, examining other features of political communication, such as emotional content as suggested by @xcite , may offer deeper insights into the nuances of populist rhetoric across different authors and political parties. this direction promises to refine our understanding of the linguistic strategies employed within political discourse.