De ‘stem van het volk’

Recently, a growing body of (political-scientific) literature has focused on the empirical measurement of populism. In such studies, “people-centrism” is one of the most frequently analysed discourse characteristics, i.e. to what extent “the people” are put in the focus of attention in a politician’s discourse. In order to measure people-centrism empirically, it is common practice to use the number of references to the electorate as the only indicator. In this contribution, we substantiate that a linguistic-stylistic analysis of “perspective” or “attributed viewpoint” offers additional tools for analysing people-centrality in (populist) political discourse empirically. As a case study, we report on an analysis of series of parliamentary speeches delivered by the Dutch populist politicians Geert Wilders and Rita Verdonk.