Abstract Are populist parties fundamentally more anti-immigration than their nonpopulist counterparts? While scholars often assume a strong link between populism, especially on the right, and anti-immigration rhetoric, this study offers a systematic empirical reassessment. Drawing on a large corpus of parliamentary speeches from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden between 1988 and 2019, we use structural topic modeling and sentiment analysis to compare how populist and nonpopulist parties engage with immigration. Our analysis shows that populist parties address immigration more frequently and use more negative language overall, though the extent varies across countries. We also find that populist and nonpopulist parties prioritize different subtopics. Populist parties are more likely to frame immigration as a threat to national values or sovereignty, while nonpopulist parties focus on integration and humanitarian concerns. Yet, both types of parties converge in their rhetoric on other topics. Lastly, rising immigration inflows do not consistently provoke negative responses from populist parties. Both populist and nonpopulist parties often adjust their focus similarly in response to immigration increases, suggesting that rhetorical strategies are shaped more by political and institutional contexts than by immigration trends alone. These findings complicate the dominant narrative linking populism to anti-immigration sentiment. Rather than viewing populist rhetoric as uniformly reactionary or hostile, our results underscore its strategic and context-dependent nature.
Choi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.