Publications &
Working Papers

The Non-Linearity Between Populist Attitudes and Ideological Extremism

with Eduardo Ryô Tamaki

Populism research has long assumed a straight line between ideology and populist sentiment. Drawing on 43 countries and 52 elections in the fifth wave of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and modelling the relationship with generalized additive models rather than imposing linearity, this article shows the line bends. Populist attitudes dip toward the centre and climb at both edges, while ideological extremism relates to them exponentially.

Populism Meets AI: Advancing Populism Research with LLMs

with E. R. Tamaki, J. Chatterley, G. Mitchell, S. Dzebo, C. Sandoval, L. Littvay & K. A. Hawkins

Measuring populism in political speech has always been slow and expensive because it requires trained human coders. Using rubric and anchor guided prompting that mirrors how those coders are trained, this paper shows that language models can grade speeches from the Global Populism Database at expert level, with the strongest configurations reaching concordance correlations above 0.94.

Populism, Ideology, and the Endorsement of Martial Law: A Conditional Relationship

with Brandon Beomseob Park

One month after South Korea's December 2024 martial law declaration, an original nationally representative survey of more than 1,500 respondents captured a rare natural test of how populists respond to emergency rule. Populist attitudes turn out to carry no fixed political direction. Among strongly populist citizens, those on the right moved sharply toward endorsing martial law while those on the left hardened against it, and the two groups separate cleanly at the top of the populism scale.

Does Immigration Fuel Populism? The Effect of Immigration on the Rise of Populist Rhetoric

with Jeongho Choi

Thirty years of parliamentary debate in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, read with structural topic modelling and sentiment analysis, complicate the assumption that immigration drives populist backlash. Populist parties do speak about immigration more often and more harshly, framing it as a threat to national values where their rivals speak of integration. Yet rising immigration itself does not reliably move them. Political and institutional context shapes the rhetoric more than the inflows do.

Navigating Populism in America: Unveiling the Socioeconomic and Ideological Roots of Populist Attitudes

American populism is often described as a mood that cuts across the political spectrum. Original nationally representative survey data, analysed with factor analysis and regression, suggests otherwise. Populist attitudes track opposition to immigration, support for gun rights, and abortion restrictions, with Christian affiliation a further predictor, while showing no meaningful pull toward healthcare expansion, environmental policy, or other progressive positions.

The Sectarian Divide: The Dynamics of Populism in South Korea

Reading 52,487 official party statements from 2012 to 2022 with a large language model, validated against human coders at a kappa of 0.84, this article traces where Korean populism actually lives. Populist rhetoric rose steadily in both major parties, spiked around elections and while a party sat in opposition, and took its most common form not as an appeal to the people but as sectarian hostility toward the other side.