Measuring and understanding parties’ anti-elite strategies

Journal article

This article presents a new measure and analysis of parties’ anti-elite appeals. In order to measure parties’ anti-elite appeals, we apply crowd-sourced coding, supervised machine learning, and novel cross-lingual transfer learning techniques to parties’ Twitter posts. Our dataset records quarterly estimates of parties’ anti-elite strategies for 20 countries between 2008 and 2021. Based on these indicators, we analyze whether parties’ anti-elite rhetoric reflects the potential costs and benefits of this electoral strategy. We find that mainstream parties use anti-elite rhetoric less frequently when they are more likely to be included in the next governing coalition. When challenger parties do well in the polls, they become more anti-elitist. Our article not only contributes to the literature on democratic competition by introducing and applying a new measure of anti-elite strategies, but it also outlines a novel, modular, and scalable procedure to measure party appeals using social media posts.

Authors: Licht, H; Abou Chadi, T; Barberá, P; Hua, W

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Journal: Journal of Politics
• Volume: 87
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 275-290
• Publication date: 2025-01-10
• Acceptance date: 2024-03-07
• DOI: 10.1086/730711
• EISSN: 1468-2508
• ISSN: 0022-3816
• Language: English
• Keywords: political parties; social media; populism; anti-elite strategies