Populism in English Civil War news discourse. A corpus-assisted discourse study of Mercurius Britanicus

This article takes as its focus the modern-day notion of populism as political discourse style and applies it to English Civil War propaganda language in order to see whether certain discourse strategies identifiable as populist may be consistent over time. In this regard, I follow Moffitt’s (2016) identification of three indexes of populism and I attempt to detect and measure their level of occurrence in English Civil War news discourse through a corpus-assisted discourse methodology. My object of inquiry is the Parliamentarian periodical Mercurius Britanicus, which came out in August 1643 in order to counterattack the propaganda of the Royalist Mercurius Aulicus. The results of the keyword and concordance analysis reveal that the three indexes of populism characterize the political style of Britanicus’s editor and that some of the features of modern-day media logic were already at work in Early Modern English propaganda discourse. This suggests that populism as discourse can be detached from contemporary politics to find interesting applications in the field of historical media discourses as well.