Measuring populist discourse using semantic text analysis: a comment.

A quantitative index for measuring populist discourse based on the number of times references are made to the own and the other group has been proposed by Aslanidis (Qual Quant, 2017. 10.1007/s11135-017-0517-4). The references to the two groups are found in the actor part of the clauses in texts. In this contribution, it is argued that the clause contains a lot of additional information not on the frequency of occurrence of populist speech, but regarding the how or the why of populist speech. In this text, this is used for a comparison of populist and non-populist statements in speeches by a Prime Minister.