Is Chávez Populist?

Abstract

This article pushes forward our understanding of populism by developing one of the more underappreciated definitions of populism, populism as discourse. It does so by creating a quantitative measure of populist discourse suitable for cross-country and historical analysis. The article starts by laying out the discursive definition of populism in the context of existing definitions. It then operationalizes this definition through a holistic grading of speeches by current chief executives and a few historical figures. The result is a data set of elite-level populist discourse in more than 40 current and past governments from a variety of countries across the world, with special focus on Latin America. This measurement has high reliability comparable to standard human-coded content analysis, compares well to common understandings of actual cases of populism, and is a reasonably efficient technique even in small samples.