Analysis of the populist discourse of the Lithuanian political parties

ENThis article aims to analyse the populist discourse of Lithuanian political parties over a 30-year period: 1990–2020. Since Lithuania belongs to the CEE region, the question arises whether it is witnessing a worrying rise of populism and a related backsliding of democracy. Although Lithuania is currently a stable consolidated democracy, the lack of a stable party system and clear ideological cleavages during the transition to democracy in the 1990s created a favourable environment for populism to flourish. In this article, we analyse the changes in populist discourse in Lithuania across different actors, sources and over time. This is done by applying machine learning models to identify populist content at the paragraph level through a corpus of political party manifestos, political party websites, and columns written by party members on Delfi.lt. The results show that, although elements of populist discourse are present in the texts of all Lithuanian political parties, the overall level of populist discourse has remained fairly stable over the period analysed, with a temporary increase in 2008–2009. We observe that populist discourse is more widespread in the media than in party manifestos and that non-parliamentary parties engage in this discourse more than their parliamentary counterparts. Keywords: populist discourse; machine learning models; political parties; Lithuania.

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