In the new issue of Party Politics, you can find an article by Mattia Zulianello and yours truly. The title of the paper is ‘Blurred positions: The ideological ambiguity of valence populist parties’. Here is the abstract:
While the diversity of populism has received considerable attention, surprisingly little is known about populist parties that defy clear-cut left-right categorization. We show that valence populist parties are non-positional and substantially different from both left-wing and right-wing populist parties. First, we demonstrate that valence populist parties deliberately take blurry positions on both the economic and socio-cultural dimensions of competition. Second, we show that such an ambiguity is counterbalanced by a disproportionate emphasis on anti-corruption appeals, the most paradigmatic example of a non-positional dimension. Our results have important implications for our understanding of varieties of populism, in particular, and the positional and non-positional competition strategies of political parties, in general.
The argument is pretty straightforward and nothing fancy is going on empirically. I appreciate what Daniel Coffey had to say about the paper: ‘I really like the idea of measuring/analyzing how parties “deliberately take blurry positions” as I think this does not get enough attention in the text analysis literature.’ Hopefully, the paper can inspire future work to further examine when and how populist parties pursue specific strategies.
I should note that the title of this post is slightly misleading. Specifically, it is not a new article as it was published online February 27, 2023 (i.e., almost a year ago!). You can find the article here. The replication material is available on GitHub.