Parallel politicization: rethinking the demand–supply divide in populism. Evidence from parliamentary and protest discourse in Romania (2020–2024)

Abstract

This article examines how populist politicization unfolds across civic and institutional arenas and what its temporal dynamics reveal about demand- and supply-side explanations of populism. Focusing on Romania between 2020 and 2024, it compares protest-related media coverage and parliamentary plenary debates to trace the circulation of five core populist themes. Rather than treating populism as either a societal attitude or an elite strategy, the study conceptualizes it as a discursive repertoire whose salience can be traced over time. Using a longitudinal, frequency-based design, the analysis tests whether politicization follows a demand-induced (bottom-up), supply-induced (top-down), or interactive logic. The findings show no consistent evidence of bottom-up diffusion from protest to parliament, nor of systematic top-down activation from parliament to protest. Parliamentary discourse exhibits a stable and routinized engagement with populist themes, whereas protest communication remains episodic and event-driven. Politicization is therefore institutionally insulated and only weakly coupled to civic mobilization. The article proposes the concept of parallel politicization to describe this configuration: a pattern in which similar populist repertoires circulate across arenas without stable temporal transmission or semantic alignment. The results suggest that populist politicization can persist without continuous feedback between citizens and elites, challenging linear demand- or supply-driven models and indicating that populism may endure as an institutionalized repertoire of political communication even when civic mobilization remains fragmented.