PopBERT. Detecting populism and its host ideologies in the German Bundestag
The rise of populism concerns many political scientists and practitioners, yet the detection of its underlying language remains fragmentary. This paper aims to provide a reliable, valid, and scalable approach to measure populist stances. For that purpose, we created an annotated dataset based on parliamentary speeches of the German Bundestag (2013 to 2021). Following the ideational definition of populism, we label moralizing references to the virtuous people or the corrupt elite as core dimensions of populist language. To identify, in addition, how the thin ideology of populism is thickened, we annotate how populist statements are attached to left-wing or right-wing host ideologies. We then train a transformer-based model (PopBERT) as a multilabel classifier to detect and quantify each dimension. A battery of validation checks reveals that the model has a strong predictive accuracy, provides high qualitative face validity, matches party rankings of expert surveys, and detects out-of-sample text snippets correctly. PopBERT enables dynamic analyses of how German-speaking politicians and parties use populist language as a strategic device. Furthermore, the annotator-level data may also be applied in cross-domain applications or to develop related classifiers.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
validSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The "Right" Discourse on Migration: Analysing Migration-Related Tweets in Right and Far-Right Political Movements
The rise of right-wing populism in Europe has brought to the forefront the significance of analysing social media discourse to understand the dissemination of extremist ideologies and their impact on political outcomes. …
Populism Meets AI: Advancing Populism Research with LLMs
Measuring the ideational content of populism remains a challenge. Traditional strategies based on textual analysis have been critical for building the field's foundations and providing a valid, objective indicator of pop…
Language Ideologies in a Multilingual Society: An LLM-based Analysis of Luxembourgish News Comments
Detecting language ideologies is a valuable yet complex task for understanding how identities are constructed through discourse. In Luxembourg's multicultural and multilingual society, language ideologies reflect more th…
Speaker attribution in German parliamentary debates with QLoRA-adapted large language models
The growing body of political texts opens up new opportunities for rich insights into political dynamics and ideologies but also increases the workload for manual analysis. Automated speaker attribution, which detects wh…
ArticlesLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language Model+3The Sound of Populism: Distinct Linguistic Features Across Populist Variants
This study explores the sound of populism by integrating the classic Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) features, which capture the emotional and stylistic tones of language, with a fine-tuned RoBERTa model, a stat…
Language ModelingLanguage Modelling