Populism in Online Election Coverage

Abstract

This article investigates the extent to which populist key messages are distributed via online news articles and reader comments, as well as how media actors, political actors, and readers employ populist online communication during election periods. Populism is defined as a thin ideology, and four dimensions of populist communication are distinguished: people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and exclusion. We analyze online news articles and reader comments during election campaigns in France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. We find that comment sections are more populist than online news articles and that the majority of populist key messages in online news articles originate from politicians, not from journalists. However, we further show that compared with straight news items, opinion-oriented stories are more prone to conveying populist key messages from media actors, whereas straight news favors populism by political actors. Finally, we investigate how online news media moderate populist key messages disseminated by political actors.

KEYWORDS:

• content analysis
• election campaigns
• online news
• populism
• political communication
• reader comments

Notes

1 In Switzerland, private broadcasters exist only at the regional and local levels. Furthermore, the existing ones do not publish news on their websites. For lack of a functional equivalent, we therefore decided not to sample this category for Switzerland.

2 The United Kingdom held an additional election in 2017. However, since this was not a regular fixed-term election but set between the usual five-year intervals, we chose the 2015 election for reasons of comparability.

3 Switzerland: Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), Sozialdemokratische Partei (SP), Lega dei Ticinesi (Lega), and Freisinnig-Demokratische Partei (FDP); United Kingdom: Labour, Scottish National Party (SNP), Liberal Democrats (LibDems); France: Front National (FN), Parti Socialiste (PS), Corsica Libera, and Parti Liberal Démocrate (PLD). The party lists are only used for the sampling procedure. In the analysis, populist statements are incorporated regardless of who their speaker is.

4 The search strings for the three different countries were as follows:Switzerland: migration OR immigration OR zuwanderung OR flüchtling OR ausländer OR asyl OR einbürgerung OR ausschaffung “SVP” OR “SP” OR “Lega” OR “FDP”United Kingdom: migration OR immigration OR refugee OR foreigner OR asylum OR naturalisation OR deportation Labour OR “Scottish National Party” OR SNP OR “Liberal Democrats” OR “Lib Dems”France: migration OR immigration OR réfugié OR étranger OR asile OR naturalisation OR expuls OR reconduite “Front National” OR “FN” OR “Parti socialiste” OR “PS” OR “Corsica Libera” OR “Parti libéral démocrate” OR “PLD”

5 According to earlier research (e.g. Spink and Jansen 2005), the majority of search engine users will only review search results on the first three result pages (assuming there are 10 search results per page by default).

6 For some news outlets, it was not possible to change the order of the reader comments. In these outlets (Le Figaro, Le Monde, Le Parisien, Rue89, Blick, SRF, and Watson), the 10 newest reader comments were selected for the sample.

7 While the unstandardized Lotus can be directly interpreted and represents the percentage agreement of coders with the category most used by all coders, the standardized Lotus is a chance-corrected version that also takes the number of categories used by coders into account (Fretwurst 2015a, 2015b). For a good summary of Lotus’s advantages and an example of its application for international comparative content analysis, see also Hopmann, Esser, and de Vreese (2016). Furthermore, Brennan and Prediger’s (1981) Kappa is more robust in assessing reliability of rare categories—as is the case with populist key messages—than Krippendorff’s alpha and Cohen’s kappa (see Quarfoot and Levine 2016).

8 The mean difference in populist messages from media speakers between opinion-oriented stories and straight news in the United Kingdom is .38 (p < .001), in Switzerland .16 (p < .05), and in France .10 (n.s.).

9 British straight news contains more populist messages by politicians than do British opinion-oriented stories, with a mean difference of .33 (indicating a surplus of populist messages by politicians in straight news), while the mean differences for France (−.05) and Switzerland (−.02) indicate that there are no differences between story types.

10 Since an article can contain populist messages from both political and media speakers, an ANOVA could not be conducted to evaluate this hypothesis. Therefore, a one-sample t-test comparing the mean difference between the share of political and media speakers to zero was calculated instead.

11 The mean difference between populist messages from political and media speakers in the United Kingdom is .42 (indicating a considerable surplus of politics-induced populism in news articles), whereas in France, the mean difference is just .07 (indicating the lack of any such surplus). The mean difference for Switzerland is .17.

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [grant number 174628].