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Main Authors: Jung, Yujin J., Tamaki, Eduardo Ryô, Chatterley, Julia, Mitchell, Grant, Dzebo, Semir, Sandoval, Cristóbal, Littvay, Levente, Hawkins, Kirk A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07458
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author Jung, Yujin J.
Tamaki, Eduardo Ryô
Chatterley, Julia
Mitchell, Grant
Dzebo, Semir
Sandoval, Cristóbal
Littvay, Levente
Hawkins, Kirk A.
author_facet Jung, Yujin J.
Tamaki, Eduardo Ryô
Chatterley, Julia
Mitchell, Grant
Dzebo, Semir
Sandoval, Cristóbal
Littvay, Levente
Hawkins, Kirk A.
contents Measuring the ideational content of populism remains a challenge. Traditional strategies based on textual analysis have been critical for building the field's foundations and providing a valid, objective indicator of populist framing. Yet these approaches are costly, time consuming, and difficult to scale across languages, contexts, and large corpora. Here we present the results from a rubric and anchor guided chain of thought (CoT) prompting approach that mirrors human coder training. By leveraging the Global Populism Database (GPD), a comprehensive dataset of global leaders' speeches annotated for degrees of populism, we replicate the process used to train human coders by prompting the LLM with an adapted version of the same documentation to guide the model's reasoning. We then test multiple proprietary and open weight models by replicating scores in the GPD. Our findings reveal that this domain specific prompting strategy enables the LLM to achieve classification accuracy on par with expert human coders, demonstrating its ability to navigate the nuanced, context sensitive aspects of populism.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07458
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Populism Meets AI: Advancing Populism Research with LLMs
Jung, Yujin J.
Tamaki, Eduardo Ryô
Chatterley, Julia
Mitchell, Grant
Dzebo, Semir
Sandoval, Cristóbal
Littvay, Levente
Hawkins, Kirk A.
Computation and Language
Measuring the ideational content of populism remains a challenge. Traditional strategies based on textual analysis have been critical for building the field's foundations and providing a valid, objective indicator of populist framing. Yet these approaches are costly, time consuming, and difficult to scale across languages, contexts, and large corpora. Here we present the results from a rubric and anchor guided chain of thought (CoT) prompting approach that mirrors human coder training. By leveraging the Global Populism Database (GPD), a comprehensive dataset of global leaders' speeches annotated for degrees of populism, we replicate the process used to train human coders by prompting the LLM with an adapted version of the same documentation to guide the model's reasoning. We then test multiple proprietary and open weight models by replicating scores in the GPD. Our findings reveal that this domain specific prompting strategy enables the LLM to achieve classification accuracy on par with expert human coders, demonstrating its ability to navigate the nuanced, context sensitive aspects of populism.
title Populism Meets AI: Advancing Populism Research with LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07458