Analysis of the populist discourse of the Lithuanian political parties

Authors

  • Jogilė Ulinskaitė Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University
  • Lukas Pukelis Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v10i4.1209
Abstract Views: 38 PDF Downloads: 27

Keywords:

populist discourse, machine learning models, political parties, Lithuania

Abstract

This 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.

Author Biographies

Jogilė Ulinskaitė, Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University

Jogilė Ulinskaitė is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. Her research focuses on populism and its links to emotional narratives about the past.

Lukas Pukelis, Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University

Lukas Pukelis is a Researcher in Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Political Science (VU IIRPS). His research interests are related to the application of the computational social science methods especially the Natural Language Processing and Text-as-Data.

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Published

2025-02-17

How to Cite

[1]
Ulinskaitė, J. and Pukelis, L. 2025. Analysis of the populist discourse of the Lithuanian political parties. Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics. 10, 4 (Feb. 2025), 59–81. DOI:https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v10i4.1209.