Hunting Populism around the world
With the latest opportunity granted to IE undergraduates by the Team Populism network and IE University, a select group of students has accepted the challenge of finding, coding and analysing the speeches of many different politicians in order to extract populist remarks. To this day, the training sessions have finished and students started working more independently on their assigned countries, and so we decided to dig deeper, and see what is it all about.
“The New Populism is a project that Team Populism is doing in cooperation with The Guardian, the UK daily. In this project, we are producing several online articles that define populism, show how much populism there is across the globe, and allow readers to measure their own populist ideas," shared Prof. Kirk Hawkins
In collaboration with IE professor Nina Wiesehomeier, professor Kirk Hawkins from the Brigham Young University has visited Madrid to carry out several training sessions on the concept of populism and the methods for its detection in real speeches. This was only the first of three parts of the project students signed up for.
“The New Populism has several parts, each of which have different partner universities. This part, measuring the populism of country leaders across the globe, involves IE students and students at Brigham Young University, where I teach. However, most of the student involvement is concentrated at IE University. Almost three dozen IE students are involved as coders,“ adds Prof. Kirk Hawkins
The second phase of the project is currently underway, as students are researching and finding the speeches of their assigned politicians themselves. This has proven to be a difficult job because some of the governors were in office before the widespread of the internet.
The third step is then coding the speeches. In contrast with the popular skill associated with programming, coding speeches means using quotes from the speech to fill in rubrics that can help one later in assessing how populist a certain politician is.
“This project is giving me a lot of experience related to politics. I am able to identify how a populist speech looks like and learn about how these populist parties attract their voters and how strong is the presence of populism in Europe nowadays," expresses Ricardo Esteban, BBA- BIR student
"To measure populism across the globe, we use a technique of textual analysis in which coders read political speeches in their original language. I don’t speak most of these languages, but IE students do (…) the training sessions have gone incredibly well. IE students are smart and highly experienced, and they have responded to the project with incredible enthusiasm," stated Prof. Kirk Hawkins.
Proud to be appreciated by the professor, students have also expressed their attitudes towards the task, sharing quite positive impressions so far:
“ I learned a lot about populism, about general politicians and types of political speeches. It’s also helping my teamwork capabilities as we are asked to fulfill our workload with a partner. I am truly interested in the International Relations side of my career and any analysis and deep understanding that I gain from politicians, discourses and history will be of great help,” believes Laura Escobar, BBA-BIR
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