Participatory Populism: Online Discussion Forums on Mainstream News Sites During the 2014 European Parliament Election

ABSTRACT

Online media have transformed the political news landscapes, changing not only professional journalistic practices but also the way in which citizens participate in political communication. In the debate about the impact of the Internet on democratic practices, some scholars emphasize the potential of digital media platforms to establish a medium for deliberative and inclusive democratic participation, whereas others underline the development of fragmented “echo chambers” driven by the interests of mainstream news organizations. We point to an alternative scenario in which online political communication develops in the direction of “participatory populism”, involving an unrepresentative group of users actively engaging in the delegitimization of democratic institutions. This engagement results in a collective voice that expresses high levels of negativity towards mainstream democratic politics. Through a study of user comments relating to the 2014 European Parliament election in Germany and the UK, we show how commenters express predominantly negative views towards not just the EU but also national government and mainstream opposition parties. We find, however, that the relationship between user comments and news platforms is highly contextualized. The nature of the relationship between comments and news platforms across countries thus warrants further investigation.

Keywords:

• European Parliament elections
• populism
• political participation
• negativity
• UK
• Germany
• internet
• social media

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Thomas Sejersen and Marie Rømer for their research assistance, Natascha Neudorfer for her advice on our data analysis, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The research for this article was supported by the University of Copenhagen's 2016 Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research (project title “Europe and New Global Challenges”).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Charlotte Galpin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8410-3300

Notes

1 EU tone = 0.85, tone towards government = 0.62, tone towards domestic populist parties = 0.67, gender of username = 0.92. No reliability test was possible for the mainstream opposition parties due to the lower level of attention paid to these actors in the test sample. Nevertheless, the scores for all other forms of directed tone and our practice of team coding give us confidence in using this variable.

2 Statistical significance cannot be tested as our data does not meet the assumption of independence of cases for ANOVA, as commenters be influenced by comments made by other users in the forums. However, we offer some tentative conclusions can be drawn to serve as a basis for further studies.