Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/282127 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
Discussion Paper No. 435
Publisher: 
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190 - Rationality and Competition, München und Berlin
Abstract: 
We provide novel evidence on how right-wing (populist) rhetoric spreads. Using several thousand speeches from the German parliament, we show that exposure to politicians from the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) leads mainstream politicians to adopt a more distinctively right-wing populist language. We measure similarity to right-wing populist rhetoric via cosine similarity to both parliamentary speeches by the AfD and extremist speeches at far-right rallies, as well as using a populist dictionary method. To induce individual-level variation in exposure to AfD politicians, we exploit a quasi-exogenous allocation rule for committee members in the German parliament. Comparing a politician with the highest to one with the lowest relative AfD exposure increases the cosine similarity to right-wing populist speech by 0.1 of a standard deviation. Our results seem specific to right-wing populism and suggest strategic motives related to local electoral competition behind rhetorical changes among individual politicians.
Subjects: 
right-wing populism
AfD
Germany
NLP
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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