Discursive Rules and Populist Radical Right Language in Subnational Parliaments

• In Event: Party Change and Party Adaptation in Democracies under Pressure

Abstract

Populism, nativism, and revisionism have become well-established parts of political discourse. However, politicians and their language are embedded in a multi-layered environment of legal constraints and historically constituted social norms that includes the national and subnational level. This paper investigates to what extent such different historical trajectories are reflected in the frequency and content of populist, nativist, and revisionist language in parliamentary speeches at the subnational level, focusing on the case of Germany.

We argue that distinct historical experiences and regime trajectories serve as an important complement to contemporary factors like unemployment or immigration when seeking to understand varying discursive practices within the same country. Our focus at the subnational level contributes to previous studies of PRR parties’ language, which have predominantly concentrated on national-level politics. Drawing on the illiberalism literature, political history, and employing a dictionary-based quantitative text analysis with topic modelling, the paper uncovers distinct discursive practices in parliamentary speeches in three German regions that relate to subnational variation in the experience of transitional justice and the collective memory of World War II.

We find regions’ distinct historical trajectory to be reflected in the frequency and content of the radical right’s populist, nativist, and revisionist discourse compared to other parties. A first analytical step reveals substantive cross-regional differences with regard to the extent to which parties make reference to nativism, populism, and the memory of World War II that reflect their distinct historical experiences and regime trajectories and add important nuance to the country’s well-established East-West divide. In a second analytical step, we use topic models to focus on the context in which references to nativism, populism, and the memory of World War II are used to tease out whether and, if yes, how the content behind these cross-regional differences in parliamentary language varies. This step reveals distinct discursive practices both across parties and subnationally that suggest notable variation in the extent to which national-level norms constrain political language in different parts of the same country. In a third analytical step, we test for significant cross-party differences in the use of selected topics. Overall, our paper underlines the value of moving below the national level as a frame of reference in the study of discursive practices in politics. Elite decisions over transitional justice as well as the collective memory of episodes of authoritarian rule importantly add to our understanding of the frequency and content of populist, nativist, and revisionist language in parliament.

Authors

• Matthias Dilling, Trinity College Dublin

• Félix Krawatzek, Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS)