Selection bias and ideological slant in DA approaches to populism

This article analyzes the approaches to populism in a corpus of 106 articles published in major discourse analysis journals in order to ascertain whether this research strand studies both right-wing and left-wing populism and whether selection biases and ideological slants can be observed. The results show a clear selection bias towards the study of right-wing populism while left-wing populism is only studied in two articles. They also show an ideological slant that tends to present the former as a threat while the latter is presented more positively, even as a true expression of democracy. The concluding discussion emphasizes the need to analyze left-wing populism in order to provide a more balanced and objective picture of the features and challenges of all types of populism.