Populist platform strategies: a comparative study of social media campaigning by Nordic right-wing populist parties

ABSTRACT

Social media platforms are increasingly becoming an important tool to mobilize populist right-wing issues and movements. This study provides comparative insights into the activity and engagement of right-wing populist parties on three social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) in four Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland). Based on a quantitative analysis of social media data, we conclude that Facebook is the most successful platform for right-wing populists across all four countries and that the right-wing populists in Sweden have the strongest position across platforms. Furthermore, we explore the content of the most engaging status updates qualitatively to identify a potential set of populist platform strategies. We conclude that the right-wing populist platform strategies are not radically different from other parties though the populist agenda and anger-based style of communication may cater particularly well to the network media logics of each platform. This could explain the relative success of right-wing populist parties that we identify in all four Nordic countries, even though it is important to note that the success is only moderate in some cases with notable national variation.

KEYWORDS:

• populism
• social media
• politics
• election
• Nordic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sander Andreas Schwartz

Sander A. Schwartz is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University. He is the Director of the Digital Media Lab at Roskilde University. Sander studies political communication and debate on social media as well as issues relating to media use, datafication and algorithms.

Matti Nelimarkka

Matti Nelimarkka is a university lecturer at Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki, and a Visiting Scholar at Aalto University. He studies the intersection of politics and technology, including topics such as politics in social media, democratic potential of technologies, design of digital system as politics, and computational methods and social theory.

Anders Olof Larsson

Anders Olof Larsson (PhD, Uppsala University, 2012) is Professor at the Department of Communication, Kristiania University College. His research interests include the use of online interactivity and social media by societal institutions and their audiences, journalism studies, political communication and methodology, especially quantitative and computational methods.