2018 Presidential Election Campaign: Populism in Candidates`Political Discourses

During election campaigns populist slogans and promises are often used in the speeches of candidates. There are some differences although between the discourses of the progovernment and the opposition candidates. It is therefore important to study the political discourse of the 2018 presidential election campaign. Since the political struggle develops in real life and is broadcast in details in the media space, the publications of the candidates on the social network VKontakte have been chosen in order to analyze their discourses. Topic modeling of the text published overtly was used to create a thematic profile of each candidate. Comparing topic profiles the author was able, firstly, to identify and compare the topics of the prostate and opposition candidates’ populist discourses, and, secondly, to identify the most similar agendas of the candidates in the information environment using the vector space model. Thereby, the thematic profiles of the candidates identified corresponded to their ideological positioning. The opposition candidates including the systemic opposition appealed to the problems of negative mobilization in their speeches, which is based on populist slogans. The discourses of candidates who pursue a certain ideology and status have been found to be similar.