The Distinctive Vocabularies of Right-Wing Populists

Right-wing populists are said to employ distinctive language to differentiate themselves from mainstream politicians. However, we know little about what makes their language distinct. We investigate this by assembling a novel corpus of speeches and using an automated text analysis tool to identify the keywords used by three right-wing populist leaders (Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini) and three of their mainstream opponents (Hillary Clinton, Emmanuel Macron and Matteo Renzi). We then examine the contexts in which those keywords are used. We find that, while Trump and Salvini are stylistically populist in different ways to Le Pen, what distinguishes all of them is the clarity of the populist message (people vs elites and others) compared to their vaguer opponents. Our results have implications for how we understand populism as both ideology and style across linguistic contexts, in addition to how we conceive of its specificity compared to the mainstream.