Brandsma, Ilse (2025) Decoding the Populist Message: A Linguistic Comparison of Populist Radical Right and Mainstream Political Speech in the Netherlands. Bachelor thesis, Global Responsibility & Leadership (GRL).
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Abstract
In recent decades, Europe has seen a rise in the popularity of Populist Radical Right political parties. This thesis investigates how PRR parties in the Netherlands (PVV and FvD) use language in their political speeches, and whether it is significantly different from mainstream parties. The study examines how PRR language has looked across Europe, followed by a new analysis using the computational tool Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). With this tool, 52 speeches from across the Dutch political spectrum are analyzed and compared. Key LIWC categories such as pronouns, emotional tone, certainty and informal language were examined to find patterns. The differences were tested using statistical tests. The results showed that the Dutch PRR parties did not use a significantly higher frequency of words related to common PRR strategies, such as the us vs. them narrative and informal language usage. However, it was found that Forum voor Democratie (FvD) uses significantly fewer positive emotion words and more certainty-related words, which suggests a rhetorical strategy centered on rational authority and conviction. The results suggest that PRR language in the Netherlands could be less rhetorically extreme than often portrayed and more aligned with mainstream discourse than expected, at least in quantifiable linguistic terms.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Name supervisor: | Verkhodanova, V. |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jun 2025 08:34 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Jun 2025 08:34 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/648 |
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