Hitting a Nerve: Populist News Articles Lead to More Frequent and More Populist Reader Comments

Abstract

Although research on effects of populist communication has increased, it is still unclear how populism in news articles affects the readers’ manifest behavior, such as whether and how they comment on online news. To address these issues, we conducted a content analysis of online news articles (N = 332) and corresponding reader comments (N = 2786) during election campaigns in France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. We find that populist key messages by political and media actors in news articles do not only provoke more reader comments but also prompt citizens to use populist key messages themselves in their comments – regardless of how journalists contextualize these statements.

Keywords:

• populism
• populist communication
• online news
• reader comments
• election campaigns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1637980.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/knv6e/?view_only=00a0fed2ca434490ba087c12031239b0

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data through Open Practices Disclosure. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/knv6e/?view_only=00a0fed2ca434490ba087c12031239b0

Notes

1. The search strings for the three different countries were as follows:CH: migration OR immigration OR zuwanderung OR flüchtling OR ausländer OR asyl OR einbürgerung OR ausschaffung “SVP” OR “SP” OR “Lega” OR “FDP” UK: 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” FR: 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”.

2. For those news outlets where it was not possible to change the order of the reader comments (Le Figaro, Le Monde, Le Parisien, Rue89, Blick, SRF, Watson), the ten newest reader comments were selected for the sample.

3. An overview of descriptive statistics for all variables can be found in Tables C and D in the online appendix.

4. As additional robustness checks, we ran the multi-level models with the three countries as well as with the 16 news outlets as additional random effects on the third level of the models. Either way, we could replicate the same results for all four models. However, since the inclusion of a third level did not improve model fit, we preferred the presented models with two levels.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [174628].

Notes on contributors

Sina Blassnig

Sina Blassnig is Research and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.

Sven Engesser

Sven Engesser is Professor in the Institute of Media and Communication, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany.

Nicole Ernst

Nicole Ernst is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.

Frank Esser

Frank Esser is Professor at the Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.