Too little, too vague: How populist parties talk about deliberation in Europe

Abstract

Populist parties place the people at the centre of polity and politics. Such parties refer to direct democracy as a suitable avenue to involve people in the decision-making process but much less is known about their approaches towards deliberation. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature and analyses how populist parties talk about deliberation in their election manifestos. It tests empirically how much they speak about deliberation and whether they have a generic discourse as opposed to specific references to forms of deliberation and levels of implementation. Our qualitative content analysis draws on the election manifestos of 84 political parties from the Manifesto Project Dataset in 23 European democracies in the national elections between 1996 and 2021. The results indicate that populists talk considerably less and use vague language about the levels of implementation compared to non-populists.