A technique to analize populist discourse: The Peruvian case

Abstract

There are different techniques that have been evaluated to identify whether a political discourse is populist or not. This research analyzes the debates in the plenary session of the Peruvian Congress during the first legislature of 2020 using NVivo and clause-based text semantic analysis (CBSTA). It is concluded that this technique allows us to observe that there is no populist discourse in the entire Congress but a partial use of it, more aimed at highlighting the demands of the people. However, there is a populist discourse when addressing some issues and within some political parties when they address certain issues. The use of populist discourse is not constant, it has variations and is applied to some issues more than others.