Although populist communication has become pervasive throughout Europe, many important questions on its political consequences remain unanswered. First, previous research has neglected the differential effects of populist communication on the Left and Right. Second, internationally comparative studies are missing. Finally, previous research mostly studied attitudinal outcomes, neglecting behavioral effects. To address these key issues, this paper draws on a unique, extensive, and comparative experiment in sixteen European countries (N = 15,412) to test the effects of populist communication on political engagement. The findings show that anti-elitist populism has the strongest mobilizing effects, and anti-immigrant messages have the strongest demobilizing effects. Moreover, national conditions such as the level of unemployment and the electoral success of the populist Left and Right condition the impact of populist communication. These findings provide important insights into the persuasiveness of populist messages spread throughout the European continent.

Cross-cultural survey research rests upon the assumption that if survey features are kept constant, data will remain comparable across languages, cultures and countries. Yet translating concepts across languages, cultures and political contexts is complicated by linguistic, cultural, normative or institutional discrepancies. Such discrepancies are particularly relevant for complex political concepts such as democracy, where the literature on political support has revealed significant cross-cultural differences in people’s attitudes toward democracy. Recognizing that language, culture and other socio-political variables affect survey results has often been equated with giving up on comparative research and many survey researchers have consequently chosen to simply ignore the issue of comparability and measurement equivalence across languages, cultures and countries. This paper contributes to the debate, using a distributional semantic lexicon, which is a statistical model measuring co-occurrence statistics in large text data. The method is motivated by structuralist meaning theory, stating that words with similar meanings tend to occur in similar contexts, and that contexts shape and define the meanings of words. Compared to other methodological approaches aimed at identifying and measuring cross-cultural discrepancies, this approach enables us to systematically analyze how the concept of democracy is used in its natural habitat. Collecting geo-tagged language data from news and social online source documents this paper descriptively explores varieties in meanings of democracy across a substantial number of languages and countries, and maps ways in which democracy is used among online populations and regions worldwide.

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Linguistic Explorations of Societies (LES) is an interdisciplinary research project with scholars from the fields of political science, computer science, and computational linguistics. The overarching ambition of LES has been to contribute to the survey-based comparative scholarship by compiling and analyzing online text data within and between languages and countries. To this end, the project has developed an online semantic lexicon, which allows researchers to explore meanings and usages of words in online media across a substantial number of geo-coded languages. The lexicon covers data from approximately 140 language–country combinations and is, to our knowledge, the most extensive free research resource of its kind. Such a resource makes it possible to critically examine survey translations and identify discrepancies in order to modify and improve existing survey methodology, and its unique features further enable Internet researchers to study public debate online from a comparative perspective. In this article, we discuss the social scientific rationale for using online text data as a complement to survey data, and present the natural language processing–based methodology behind the lexicon including its underpinning theory and practical modeling. Finally, we engage in a critical reflection about the challenges of using online text data to gauge public opinion and political behavior across the world.

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