Extreme parties and populism: an analysis of Facebook and Twitter across six countries

ABSTRACT

Parties are adapting to the new digital environment in many ways; however, the precise relations between populist communication and social media are still hardly considered. This study compares populist communication strategies on Twitter and Facebook employed by a broad spectrum of left-wing, center, and right-wing political actors in six Western democracies. We conduct a semi-automated content analysis of politicians’ social media statements (N = 1400) and find that populism manifests itself in a fragmented form and is mostly used by political actors at the extremes of the political spectrum (both right-wing and left-wing), by opposition parties, and on Facebook.

KEYWORDS:

• Populist communication
• social media
• opposition party
• politics
• content analysis
• online communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nicole Ernst is Research and Teaching Assistant at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. She is writing her PhD about populist communication in the media by adopting an international and intermedia comparison approach [email: [email protected]].

Sven Engesser is Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. He has received his PhD from LMU Munich. His research focuses on political communication, science communication, and media systems [email: [email protected]].

Florin Büchel is Research and Teaching Assistant at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. He wrote his PhD about journalistic reporting styles in election campaigns compared across several countries. Additionally, he is interested in various aspects of social scientific methodology, media sociology, political communication, and normative media theory [email: [email protected]].

Sina Blassnig is Research and Teaching Assistant at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. She is writing her PhD about populist online communication in the self-representation, media representation, and audience reconstruction of political actors from a comparative perspective [email: [email protected]].

Frank Esser is Professor of International and Comparative Media Research at the University of Zurich. His recent books include Mediatization of Politics (Palgrave, 2014) and Handbook of Comparative Communication Research (Routledge, 2012) [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. Populist styles like emotional or colloquial language, simplification, or scandalization on the other hand refer to the way the content is presented.

2. Politicians with high social media resonance are identified through the following sources:

CH: http://twittermonitor.somepolis.ch

DE: http://www.bundestwitter.de/politiker and https://pluragraph.de/categories/politik

FR: http://www.elus20.fr/classement-politique-twitter-facebook/#twitter and http://ymobactus.miaouw.net/labo-top-politiques.php

IT: http://www.socialbakers.com/statistics/twitter/profiles/italy/society/politics

UK: https://thegeographist.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/uk-100-most-followed-british-politicians-on-twitter

US: http://www.davemanuel.com/the-most-popular-us-politicians-by-twitter-followers-163 and http://www.socialbakers.com/statistics/twitter/profiles/united-states/society/politics/

3. As the distribution of populist statements in the reliability test is skewed and most individual statements do not contain any populism, we use Brennan and Prediger's Kappa (Brennan & Prediger, 1981) as a measure of reliability. As Quarfoot and Levine (2016) have shown, this measure is more robust in assessing reliability of rare categories than Krippendorff's Alpha and Cohen's Kappa (p. 397).

4. The sample contains parties with higher right-wing scores compared to left-wing parties, which results in a slight positive skewness (.217) of party extremism.

5. We can report the same pattern for the single sub-dimensions: parties at the extremes of the political spectrum use more anti-elitist (F(4, 83) = 3.74, p < .01, η² = .154) and people-centrist statements (F(4, 83) = .181, ns, η² = .009). Country comparison for the overall use of populism revealed the same U-curve for DE, CH, UK, and US. However, in southern Europe (FR and IT), the pattern is different as we report a linear increase form left to right-wing parties.

6. Opposition parties used more populism across all six democracies and both dimensions: anti-elitism (F(1, 85) = 9.91, p < .01, η²= .104) and people-centrism (F(1, 85) = .444, ns, η²= .005).

7. The degree of anti-elitism (F(1, 1394) = 2.07, p < .05, η²= .001) and people-centrism (F(1, 1394) = 8.85, p < .01, η²= .006) is higher on Facebook than on Twitter. Country comparison revealed that Switzerland is the only country where Twitter reported higher degrees of populism compared to Facebook (F(1, 214) = 5.315, p < .05, η²= .024).

8. When the absolute value instead of squared scores of party extremism is included in the OLS regression, the effects for opposition parties (β = .096, p < .001) and Facebook (β = .085, p < .001) are identical. For party extremism, we can only report a trend (β = .056, p = .065).

9. With exception of the German “The Left” which is especially on the regional level more influential by being part of the regional governments compared with the other far left parties.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Center of Competence in Research on ‘Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century’ (NCCR Democracy), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).