Samenvatting

Populist parties have received a great amount of attention in the last decade. Scholars agree on the fact that populism addresses issues that are relevant for the majority. However, the established political elites do not discuss and address
these issues clearly. Therefore, populist parties stir up the political agenda and force topics, such as immigration and Euroscepticism, to reface in the national and international debate. One of the most recent notable events is Brexit in the
United Kingdom. Right-wing parties, such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), have been held responsible for the occurrence of Brexit. The UKIP has recently risen to the political mainstream -even though still a
minority party – in the UK.
The aim of this study was to measure the degree of populism in the UKIP. Therefore, the research question is as follows: ‘’To what extent can we consider the UKIP to be a populist party?’’ This entails a comparative content analysis in
which the party manifesto of the UKIP was compared to the party manifestos of the British National Party (BNP) and the Conservative Party. Moreover, the UKIP Statement of Principles and the UKIP election pamphlet were analyzed
to determine the political discourse of the party.
The research question was answered by means of the two content analysis methods: the computer-based analysis and the classical content analysis. Pauwels and Rooduijn’s (2010) pre-constructed dictionary was used in the computerbased
analysis. The dictionary measured the following categories: populism, exclusionism and people. The fourth category, anti-elitism, was measured by means of the classical content analysis.
The findings showed that the BNP scored highest in all four categories. Therefore, it could be argued that the BNP has the highest degree of populism in their party manifesto. The UKIP scored second and these scores were still
significantly higher compared to the Conservative Party. Secondly, the UKIP Statement of Principles and the UKIP election pamphlet scored a substantially high degree of populism. Most importantly, the results support the constructed
theoretical framework and revealed that the UKIP has managed to break away from the sidelines in the British political context. In 2014, the party won the EU-elections with 26,6 per cent of the national vote (Ford & Goodwin, 2014).
Moreover, they had a big influence with their ‘Leave Campaign’ and they forced the Conservative Party to give in to a European membership referendum in 2016. Therefore, it could be stated that the UKIP is ‘’the’’ most successful
populist party in the UK.
On this basis, it is recommended to combine the computer-based analysis with the classical content analysis on all documents in future research. A combination of these methods would produce more valid and reliable results. It is
advised, to take multiple political documents into consideration.