We conceptualize populism and nationalism as vertical and horizontal discursive frames of sovereignty, and we investigate the prevalence of these frames in the speeches of chief executives (presidents and prime ministers) in Europe and North America to assess whether these discourses are on the rise at the highest levels of government. To do so, we compile an original database of leader speeches, measuring both discourses using a technique called holistic grading. We find that neither populism nor nationalism is on the rise across Europe and North America over the past twenty years; instead, the rise is concentrated in sub-regions and specific countries. We also find that populism and nationalism are highly but imperfectly correlated in leaders’ speeches in the corpus as a whole, but that populism is far less common in the speeches of western leaders. In the penultimate section, we use a selection of speech vignettes to demonstrate that state leaders employ populism to counter political opponents, nationalism to counter hostile nations, and a combination to mobilize against conjoined threats from above and beyond the “people-nation.”

我们将民粹主义和民族主义概念化为纵向和横向的主权话语框架，我们调查了这些框架在欧洲和北美首席执行官（总统和总理）的演讲中的普遍性，以评估这些话语是否正在兴起。最高级别的政府。为此，我们编译了一个原始的领导者演讲数据库，使用一种称为整体评分的技术来衡量这两种话语。我们发现，在过去的二十年里，欧洲和北美的民粹主义和民族主义都没有抬头；相反，上升集中在次区域和特定国家。我们还发现，民粹主义和民族主义在整个语料库中的领导人演讲中高度但不完全相关，但这种民粹主义在西方领导人的​​演讲中远没有那么普遍。在倒数第二部分，我们使用精选的演讲片段来展示国家领导人使用民粹主义来对抗政治对手，使用民族主义来对抗敌对国家，并结合起来对抗来自“人民-国家”之上和之外的联合威胁。