Why Parties Turn Anti‑Elite: New Twitter Evidence From 20 Countries

What the Authors Ask

Hauke Licht, Tarik Abou‑Chadi, Pablo Barberá, and Whitney Hua ask when and why political parties use anti‑elite rhetoric. The study evaluates whether parties’ appeals against political, economic, or cultural elites respond to clear electoral incentives—such as prospects for office or success in the polls—or reflect other, less strategic forces.

Why This Matters

Anti‑elite appeals are a central tool in contemporary party competition, linked to populism, polarization, and voter mobilization. Measuring these appeals consistently across languages and countries has been difficult; answering whether parties strategically deploy anti‑elite rhetoric bears directly on debates about democratic competition and how parties adapt to changing electoral opportunities.

How Anti‑Elite Appeals Are Measured

The authors build a new, cross‑national indicator of parties’ anti‑elite strategies using parties’ Twitter posts. Their pipeline combines crowd‑sourced human coding to create labeled examples, supervised machine learning to classify text, and novel cross‑lingual transfer learning techniques to scale labels across languages without requiring massive manual annotation in each country.

Data and Methods

• Quarterly estimates of parties’ anti‑elite rhetoric for 20 countries spanning 2008–2021.
• Source data are parties’ public Twitter posts; labels come from crowd‑sourced coding and are extended via supervised classifiers and cross‑lingual transfer methods.
• The resulting indicators are modular and scalable, allowing comparisons of party strategies over time and across languages.

Key Findings

• Mainstream parties use anti‑elite rhetoric less often when they are more likely to be part of the next governing coalition, consistent with office‑seeking incentives that dampen oppositional appeals.
• Challenger parties increase anti‑elite rhetoric when they are doing well in the polls, suggesting that perceived electoral momentum encourages confrontational messaging.
• The evidence supports a strategic interpretation: parties calibrate anti‑elite appeals in response to expected costs and benefits tied to office prospects and electoral standing.

Implications for Comparative Politics

The study contributes a new, replicable measure of party anti‑elite appeals and demonstrates a practical method for analyzing party rhetoric on social media across languages. Its findings imply that shifts in coalition prospects and poll standing help explain when parties adopt or abandon anti‑elite strategies, with implications for understanding the spread of populist and anti‑establishment messaging.