Leader Rhetoric and the Quality of Democratic Governance

• In Event: Democratic Backsliding: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

How does the rhetoric of populism and extremism influence the tendency to democratic backsliding when candidates using this rhetorical devices gain power? The last two decades have seen an upsurge of new populist and extremist movements associated with with varying degrees of democratic backsliding when those movements gain political power. Democratic backsliding has been associated with populists on both the political right and left. Populism is commonly described as a rhetorical approach comprising anti-elite and people-centric dimensions and is commonly contrasted to liberal pluralism. Yet the degrees of anti-elite, people-centric, and pluralist rhetoric vary among both populist and non-populist parties and other extremist rhetoric adds a further dimension. This research uses speeches by heads of state to score leaders on dimensions of populism, pluralism, and extremism using a semi-supervised machine learning model and examines their effect on occurrence and consolidation of democratic backsliding and democratization.

Author

• Tom Hanna, University of Houston