Felix Hagemeister - Is Populism Contagious? Evidence from Parliamentary Speeches in Germany/ COVID-19 and Populism - A Push to the Extremes?

We provide novel evidence of a contagion effect of right-wing populism in the political arena. Using several thousand digitized speeches from the German Parliament, we show that exposure to right-wing populist politicians makes non-populist politicians slant their parliamentary speeches towards the populist rhetoric. We measure similarity to populist rhetoric both via a supervised dictionary method and via unsupervised cosine similarity to parliamentary speeches from AfD politicians. We validate our measure using manifestly populist speeches at populist rallies. We exploit exogenous variation from the allocation rule for committee members in the German Parliament to identify a causal estimate. We find that an additional AfD member in a shared committee of 20 politicians is associated with a 0.375 increase in standardized AfD cosine similarity. The effect remains robust to including party, month, committee, and speaker fixed effects and does not seem to be driven by shared committee topics or selection effects.