Research

Luo, Yuchen. 2024. “We Got Our Guy!: Populist Attitudes after Populists Gain Power.”

Socius 10:23780231241234638. doi:10.1177/23780231241234638. [LINK]

Research on populist attitudes and populist leaders’ narratives has largely overlooked what happens to populist attitudes after a populist is elected, especially among the populist’s supporters. Existing literature points to two possible directions of change. On one hand, if populist attitudes stem from a perceived lack of representation, then we would expect people’s populist attitudes to decrease once their preferred candidate is in power. On the other hand, scholars have observed that populist politicians in power continue to deploy populist rhetoric, suggesting that their supporters’ populist attitudes should stay constant or even increase. In this project, the author focuses on Donald Trump and his supporters to explore this mechanism. Drawing on a national survey conducted around the 2016 and 2020 elections, the author shows that Trump’s supporters saw a significant decrease in populist attitudes after he came into power compared with both other American voters and other Republicans. The author also demonstrates that this decrease in populist attitudes is associated with changes in the level of “feeling represented.” On the basis of these findings, the author argues that populist attitudes are driven by feelings of lack of representation over other mechanisms.

Bonikowski, Bart, Yuchen Luo, and Oscar Stuhler. 2022. “Politics as Usual? Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952– 2020) with Neural Language Models.” Sociological Methods & Research 51(4):1721–87. doi:10.1177/00491241221122317. [LINK] (Equal Authorship) 

Radical-right campaigns commonly employ three discursive elements: anti-elite populism, exclusionary and declinist nationalism, and authoritarianism. Recent scholarship has explored whether these frames have diffused from radical-right to centrist parties in the latter’s effort to compete for the former’s voters. This study instead investigates whether similar frames had been used by mainstream political actors prior to their exploitation by the radical right (in the U.S., Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns). To do so, we identify instances of populism, nationalism (i.e., exclusionary and inclusive definitions of national symbolic boundaries and displays of low and high national pride), and authoritarianism in the speeches of Democratic and Republican presidential nominees between 1952 and 2020. These frames are subtle, infrequent, and polysemic, which makes their measurement difficult. We overcome this by leveraging the affordances of neural language models—in particular, a robustly optimized variant of bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (RoBERTa) and active learning. As we demonstrate, this approach is more effective for measuring discursive frames than other methods commonly used by social scientists. Our results suggest that what set Donald Trump’s campaign apart from those of mainstream presidential candidates was not the invention of a new form of politics, but the combination of negative evaluations of elites, low national pride, and authoritarianism—all of which had long been present among both parties—with an explicit evocation of exclusionary nationalism, which had been articulated only implicitly by prior presidential nominees. Radical-right discourse—at least at the presidential level in the United States—should therefore be characterized not as a break with the past but as an amplification and creative rearrangement of existing political-cultural tropes.

Luo, Yuchen. “Semantic Boundary-Work in Action: When “Anti-China” Became a Tool for Cultural Policing” (under review, American Journal of Sociology)

Luo, Yuchen. “A Nation Framed: Victimhood in China’s State Media from the 1960s to 2020s.” (manuscript in preparation)

Bonikowski, Bart, and Yuchen Luo. “National Identification on Twitter or How to Find a Needle in a Haystack with LLMs” (writing stage)

Luo, Yuchen, and Alex Barnard. “Escalating Disruption, De-Escalating Policing? Trajectories of Police-Protester Interactions in the Occupy Wall Street Movement” (data analysis stage)

Luo, Yuchen, and Claire Sieffert. “The Meaning of Accountability” (data analysis stage)