Florin Büchel

Populism and social media: how politicians spread a fragmented ideology

ABSTRACT Populism is a relevant but contested concept in political communication research. It has been well-researched in political manifestos and the mass media. The present study focuses on another part of the hybrid media system and explores how politicians in four countries (AT, CH, IT, UK) use Facebook and Twitter for populist purposes. Five key elements of populism are derived from the literature: emphasizing the sovereignty of the people, advocating for the people, attacking the elite, ostracizing others, and invoking the ‘heartland’. A qualitative text analysis reveals that populism manifests itself in a fragmented form on social media. Populist statements can be found across countries, parties, and politicians’ status levels. While a broad range of politicians advocate for the people, attacks on the economic elite are preferred by left-wing populists. Attacks on the media elite and ostracism of others, however, are predominantly conducted by right-wing speakers. Overall, the paper provides an in-depth analysis of populism on social media. It shows that social media give the populist actors the freedom to articulate their ideology and spread their messages. The paper also contributes to a refined conceptualization and measurement of populism in future studies.

More of the Same or Marketplace of Opinions? A Cross-National Comparison of Diversity in Online News Reporting

This paper examines diversity in online news reporting and explanatory factors that shape news production. The analysis is based on online news from six countries (the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, and Italy), comparing online-only news sites and legacy media. The analysis shows that most online media reported in a diverse way, comprising multiple topics and actors. Furthermore, event-driven news journalism explains the occurrence of high diversity in news reporting. Available resources and the intensiveness of online reporting (the extent as well as the editing style) also account for diversity. We draw from these findings to make a contribution to research on diversity in online news and to comparative communication studies. Qualitative comparative analysis is used to reflect on the direction and meaning of changes in journalistic practices in the current media environment.

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.

Building Empirical Typologies with QCA Toward a Classification of Media Systems

Typologies are omnipresent both in everyday life as well as in the sciences. Epistemologically, there are several systematic ways to build typologies, such as qualitative, theory-based descriptions on one end and quantitative, exploratory statistical means on the other end of the spectrum. Both have their specific advantages and disadvantages, which can be bridged by applying set-theoretic methods, such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The contribution of this paper is substantial and methodological: First, we show how QCA can enhance our understanding of media systems by building a typology that draws on Hallin and Mancini’s framework. The main improvement of QCA is the ability to identify ideal types as well as border cases. In our analysis, we move beyond the widely discussed case of Great Britain and take a closer look at further border cases such as Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Second, QCA has been scarcely applied to build typologies and if so, only in neighboring disciplines. Thus, we aim at familiarizing comparative political communication scholars with this method.

Mediatization of Campaign Coverage: Metacoverage of US Elections

If mediatization, like globalization and modernization, is a meta-process of societal change (Krotz, 2008) whereby “the media have become integrated into the operations of other social institutions [and] acquired the status of social institutions in their own right” (Hjarvard, 2008, p. 113), then, arguably, this is nowhere more evident than in contemporary election campaigns. In most Western democracies, there are reciprocal dependencies — mutual need but different goals — between media organizations and the political parties and campaign organizations that vie for votes during elections (Gurevitch & Blumler, 1990). To be sure, the nature of these interdependencies is shaped by structural and cultural features of the media and political institutions within a country (Blumler & Gurevitch, 2001; see Stromback & Esser, 2009, pp. 217–218 for a useful summary). However, on the whole, mediatization theorists and researchers are interested in the processes and mechanisms through which these interdependencies typically tilt over time towards the media (Stromback, 2008). News organizations lie at the center of interest in work on the mediatization of politics (Esser, 2013). Accordingly, in election settings, the concern is with how the media logic of commercial imperatives, professional routines and message formats not only comes to dominate the content of campaign news, but also how it gets integrated into the political logic of political rules, organizational structures and routines, and self-presentational strategies that political parties and campaign organizations must follow in order to campaign effectively (Stromback, 2008; Stromback & Esser, 2009).

Populist communication in talk shows and social media. A comparative content analysis in four countries

To understand populism, it is crucial to understand populist political communication. We investigate how politicians across the political spectrum employ populist communication in different non-institutionalized communication arenas. Populism is defined as a thin ideology and three dimensions of populist communication are distinguished: people-centrism, anti elitism, and exclusion. We analyze politicians’ statements in talk shows and social media (Twitter and Facebook) in four Western democracies. The Analysis shows that populist communication is context-dependent and that the use of the three dimensions varies across political systems, media channels, and party types.