Inviting the Populists to the Party: Populist Appeals in Presidential Primaries
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231181558 |
| Author | Zachary Scott |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Political Research Quarterly
2023, Vol. 76(4) 1827–1842
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231181558
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Inviting the Populists to the Party: Populist
Appeals in Presidential Primaries
Zachary Scott
1
Abstract
The aftermath of the 2016 election cycle ignited significant interest in populism among scholars of American politics, yet
relatively little engagement has gone toward how American political elites and institutions respond to populist in-
surgencies. This is problematic as the response a populist insurgency receives likely affects its degree of success, there by
conditioning the substantive importance of rising populism. This paper addresses this shortcoming by articulating an
audition and assimilation theory of party response to populist insurgencies. This theory predicts that parties, presented
with an electorally viable populist insurgency in a presidential primary contest, can choose to assimilate the message while
removing the populist content to diffuse the insurgent nature. In contrast, an electorally unviable populist insurgency is
treated as a failed audition, warranting no response. Using a corpus of presidential primary candidate speeches, I show
that party nominees assimilate the topics used by populists who demonstrate electoral viability but do not become more
populist themselves. This assimilation is also found among party platforms. Furthermore, assimilation is only performed
by the Democratic party and exceeds assimilation of topics used by electorally viable, non-populist rivals.
Keywords
populism, political parties, presidential primaries, campaigns and elections
While Hillary Clinton began her quest for the 2016
Democratic party nomination as a heavy favorite and
eventually won it by a comfortable margin, the campaign
itself was anything but uncontentious. Bernie Sanders, the
self-styled Democratic Socialist who did not openly af-
filiate with the Democratic party until 2019, came close to
pulling off a remarkable upset. Part of how he transitioned
from relative obscurity to the leader of a political
movement was via his left-wing populist appeal.
1
The nascent Americanist study of populism often
points to Sanders’2016 campaign as emblematic of in-
creasingly frequent populist insurgencies (e.g., Oliver &
Rahn 2016). In documenting Sanders’populist appeals,
however, something important is overlooked: How the
Clinton campaign and the Democratic party reacted to this
insurgency. Did they remain static, sticking true to the
message that made Clinton the establishment favorite to
begin with? Or were they dynamic, adapting in light of
Sanders’electoral performance? By not addressing such
questions, existing studies of American populism provide
an incomplete picture of the consequences of populist
insurgencies.
Conventional wisdom holds that parties and their
standard-bearers, fearing party fracture (e.g., Southwell
2010), often make concessions to the losers of nomination
contests. Parties are coalitional and strategic (Hassell
2021) making the balancing of competing interests and
priorities second nature. Populist challengers, however,
present a different obstacle. Populism is inherently an-
tagonistic toward the coalitional pragmatism of political
parties (Lee 2019;Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018). The anti-
pluralism, anti-partyism of populism makes it an insurgent
faction (Blum 2020) seeking takeover instead of con-
cessions. Given this natural hostility, do parties respond to
populist insurgencies as if they were another, less belli-
cose internal party dispute? I argue that they do. Parties
are aided in this process by the electoral rules of nomi-
nation contests, which functionally allow parties to “au-
dition”insurgencies. Should an insurgency demonstrate
1
College of the Environment and Life Sciences, University of Rhode
Island, Washington, DC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Zachary Scott, College of the Environment and Life Sciences, University
of Rhode Island, 7225 George Ave. NW Unit B; Washington, DC
20012, USA.
Email: zscottphd@gmail.com
electoral viability, the party concedes some by assimi-
lating the issues emphasized by the populist while dis-
carding the populism itself.
I test this theory using the Presidential Primaries
Communication Corpus (PPCC), a corpus containing
almost 3400 speeches by presidential primary candidates
in contests from 2000–2020 (Scott 2021). I show that
nominees assimilate the issue topics of populist candi-
dates who demonstrate electoral viability but exhibit no
change in issue topics in response to nonviable populist
insurgencies. But the candidates do not become more
populist themselves. This assimilation extends beyond the
nominees to the party platforms as well. When compared,
assimilation from viable, populist rivals appears more
consistently than assimilation from viable, non-populist
challengers. Interestingly, only the Democratic party
exhibits this pattern of issue topic assimilation.
American Populism
The 2016 U.S. presidential election ignited Americanist
academic interest in populism (Groshek & Koc-Michalska
2017;Lacatus 2019;Lamont, Park, & Ayala-Hurtado
2017;Oliver & Rahn 2016;Schneiker 2020). While
some pointed to earlier movements as forerunners
(Gervais & Morris 2018;Husted 2015), the pervading
notion was that some new phenomenon had suddenly
materialized. Of course, populism was hardly new to
American politics (Kazin 1995) or political science (e.g.,
Armony & Armony 2005;Canovan 1999;Hawkins,
Kaltwasser, & Andreadis 2018;Laclua 2005;Weyland
1999). What was new was its afforded prominence in the
discussion among Americanists (Hawkins & Littvay
2019). Consequently, students of American politics
suddenly found themselves playing catch-up on decades
of insight.
An Americanist would likely come to two overarching
conclusions upon first encounter with the comparativist
populism literature: one of surprising controversy and
another of strong consensus. Beginning with the former,
the populism literature has struggled to articulate what
populism is. The starkest definitional divide lies between
the strategic and ideational approaches to populism. The
strategic school of thought conceptualizes populism pri-
marily as a communication style dominated by simplistic,
emotional, and blame-laden presentational attributes
(Bos, van der Brug, & de Vreese 2010;Bucy et al. 2020;
Jagers & Walgrave 2007). In contrast, the ideational
school sees populism as a worldview positing a dichot-
omy between the morally pure people and the dastardly
elites (Hawkins & Kaltwasser 2017;Mudde & Kaltwasser
2017). It is a “thin-centered ideology”(Mudde 2004),
meaning that it does not, by itself, provide much guidance
on political issues or policy as the wants and desires of
“the people”are flexible. Instead, populism typically
exists attached to some other ideology, acting as a framing
device or moral justification.
While possessing distinctive attributes, significant
commonalities remain between these two camps. Both
schools focus on the communicative patterns of elites, but
the ideational approach places more emphasis on what
populist politicians say, while the strategic approach
stresses how they say it. Both also feature a strong, people-
centric component to this communication. For the idea-
tionalist this people-centrism is explicit, while it takes on a
more symbolic form in the strategic conceptualization.
And both note the thin, malleability of populism that
allows it to match with seemingly any left-right ideo-
logical position.
Furthermore, while often discussed as alternatives, it is
not entirely clear what the relationship is between the two.
Experimental evidence suggests that it is the “populist
style”(i.e., the strategic communication) rather than
“populist rhetoric”(i.e., the ideational framing device)
that causes the greater reaction among the public, al-
though the effects are heterogeneous by respondent
cynicism and education (Bos, van der Brug, & de Vreese
2013). Observationally, it is possible that the two con-
ceptualizations of populism co-occur at high rates. For
example, candidates who use ideationally populist rhet-
oric might also tend to do so in a simplistic and emotional
manner. It is also possible that the two are orthogonally
related; simplistic and emotional appeals might be readily
used by candidates who don’t frame political conflict in
people-versus-elites, Manichean terms.
Populism has been conceptualized in distinctive, if not
entirely discrete, ways that creates a lack of clarity as to
how the two conceptualizations relate. Examining
American populism thus requires an investigation of the
political communication of people-centric messaging, but
the precise form that this takes is subject to debate.
While defining populism has proved schismatic, ar-
ticulating the consequences of populism has resulted in
significant harmony. Populism tends to be destabilizing to
democracy (Cohen et al. 2022;Lee 2019). Populist
candidates and parties mobilize constituencies predis-
posed against compromise (Bakker, Schumacher, &
Rooduijn 2021) and higher in discriminatory attitudes
(Anduizo & Rico 2022). Once mobilized, populism tends
to be dispositional and blame-oriented (Busby, Gubler, &
Hawkins 2019;Hameleers, Bos, & de Vrees 2017),
emphasizing the types of simple and quick solutions that
can attract attention but are unlikely to truly address
systemic problems. Populist movements are more effec-
tive at scapegoating than they are at truly addressing
everyday issues. For example, populist regimes tend to
erode press freedom (Kenny 2020), often as populist ire is
directed at journalists as “the enemy of the people”for
1828 Political Research Quarterly 76(4)
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