When Populism? Consistent and Opportunistic Populist Communication in the 2022 Brazilian Presidential Elections

When do presidential candidates use populist communication, and does its prevalence vary across policy domains? We address these questions using an original dataset of 11,885 tweets from nine Brazilian presidential candidates during the 2022 elections. Drawing on the ideational approach, we operationalize populist discourse as the co-occurrence of people-centrism and anti-elitism, measured with fine-tuned BERT-based classifiers, and classify policy domains with the Comparative Agendas Project framework. Our findings reveal substantial heterogeneity across candidates, challenging expectations that populist communication uniformly intensifies during campaigns or systematically varies across policy domains according to ideology. Rather than increasing uniformly during the campaign, populist appeals escalate strategically for some candidates as elections approach, while remaining stable for others throughout the electoral year. We propose a typology distinguishing opportunistic from consistent populists. Across policy domains, government operations serve as a baseline facilitating populist framing. Left-wing candidates increase populist rhetoric in labor/employment, consistent with issue ownership expectations, but right-wing candidates reduce populist appeals in their traditionally owned domains of law and crime and civil rights, contrary to expectations. Overall, we show that populism is neither a universal campaign imperative nor a content-neutral communication style, but a flexible discursive frame shaped by candidate strategy, electoral context, and policy content.