On mainstream parties’ professionalized use of populist communication on social networking sites: an analysis of party Facebook contents in Taiwan’s 2020 national election

Abstract

Despite the fruitful research on populist communication patterns of fringe parties on social network sites, mainstream parties’ communicative behaviors have often been ignored. From a perspective of political campaign, this study argues that mainstream parties could professionalize their use of populist frameworks as the campaign strategy on social network sites. The professionalization of populist communication is defined as a) mainstream parties’ deliberate selections to stylistic devices to present certain affects in political campaign and b) mainstream parties’ increasing use of populist frameworks with an increasing online user engagement. With a focus on the Taiwan’s 2020 national election, a dataset composed of Facebook posts of parliamentary parties (N total = 3,315) is analyzed. Our findings indicate that mainstream parties per se tend to adopt more moderate populist frameworks on Facebook. While stylistic devices are positively associated with populist communication, mainstream parties tend to present populist frameworks in negative and emotional styles. While online user engagement is partially associated with populist communication, higher online engagement does not intensify mainstream parties’ degrees of using populist frameworks on Facebook.

Keywords:

• Professionalization
• populist communication
• mainstream parties
• online user engagement
• Taiwan’s 2020 national election
• Facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Three scores are calculated based on different criteria. Percentage agreement is the simplest way to show the consistency between coders because it computes consistent coding results between coders. Krippendorff’s Alpha is a widely used criterion to judge reliability between coders in content analysis. Different from most other reliability measurements, it calculates disagreement. Brennan and Prediger’s Κappa is another reliability measurement for researchers. Its calculation is based on standard percentage agreement among coders.

2 Since the first presidential election in 1996, the government (the executive power) has been rotated and led by either KMT (e.g., 2008–2016) or DPP (e.g., 2000–2008, 2016–2020).

3 Besides, the TPP does not clearly reveal its position on the Cross-strait relations. It is totally different from other parties labelled as pan-green or pan-blue camps. Hence, we set the TPP as the reference in our model.

4 The inter-coder reliability of the variable reaches satisfactory level: 88.6% for the Agreement Percent, 0.67 for the Krippendorff’s Alpha, and 0.82 for the Brennan-Prediger’s Kappa.

Additional information

Funding

This word was supported by the National Science and Technology Council.

Notes on contributors

Jiun-Chi Lin

Jiun-Chi Lin (PhD) received his PhD double-degree diplomas from the Institute of Political Science (NSYSU) and the Institute for Media Studies (KU Leuven). His current research focuses on political communication (e.g., media effects, party communication, political marketing), populism, party politics, internet politics, and European studies. His research adopts mixed-method approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods.

Leen d’Haenens

Leen d'Haenens (PhD) is Professor in Communication Science at the Institute for Media Studies of the Faculty of Social Science in KU Leuven, where she teaches ‘Analysis of Media Texts’ and ‘European Media Policy’ at the BA level, and ‘Media, Audiences and Identity’ at the MA level. Her research interests touch upon young people and (social) media use, with a focus on vulnerable youth. She combines quantitative and qualitative methods, multi-site comparisons, and in recent years ‘small data’ with ‘big data’ methods. She is co-editor of Communications (De Gruyter) and associate editor of The International Communication Gazette (Sage). She is a member of the Euromedia Research Group.

Dachi Liao

Dachi Liao (PhD) is Emeritus Professor in the Institute of Political Science (NSYSU). Her research areas mainly involve comparative politics, comparative legislative studies, and internet politics. She has published more than 80 reviewed articles in various political journals and edited four books separately published by Palgrave and NSYSU. She also established the iVoter platform, a kind of Voting Advice Applications (VAA), in Taiwan.