Yesterday, at #PSAI2019, I presented some first results from ongoing research I've been doing (mainly as a side-project until now) on Australian major party youth wings. I've done interviews with youth wing execs in all states & territories, plus an online survey. A wee #thread "Why should we study youth wings?" Well, they're a key entry point into parties, they help us understand party organizations, & they develop party officials, candidates, MPs & prime ministers of tomorrow. Like these lads, who led NSW Young Labor & Young Liberals back in the day.

I'm looking through the classifications of parties in the Norris-Inglehart book.

I think most Italian politics and populist experts would be very surprised to find the Partito Democratico classified as 'populist' and Forza Italia as 'pluralist'. And those familiar with the Swiss People's Party will raise an eyebrow at it no longer being considered populist:

Despite the expression, I had a lot of fun today presenting our research with Stefano Ondelli on populist language. Stefano's a linguistics professor and, for years, we've been talking about doing something together on populist language. But the catalyst was stories like this about Trump's supposedly simple language: