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Scholars connect the rise of populist parties and the growing importance of social media platforms for political communication as the emerging social media logic seems well-suited to populist communication. The following research note presents a novel dataset that connects Facebook accounts to party-level populism data from the POPPA database. Over 600,000 posts from 226 parties between 2017 and 2019 were analysed. The results show that in most European countries, populist parties are more active than non-populist parties on Facebook. However, high variation in the frequency of posts emphasises that country-specific aspects play an important role. Generally, Italian parties are much more active than those from other countries, whereas those in Northern and Western Europe are the least active. The most active party in Europe, the Italian right-wing populist Lega, showed the most extreme level of activity: its daily activity is around 20 times higher than the median. Furthermore, this analysis highlights why researchers should carefully check Facebook data for implausible inactivity and how connecting different data resources can help overcome potential biases resulting from missing data. Future studies analysing any party communication on Facebook will benefit from the insights and the list of party accounts featured herein.

Direct democracy in Germany is primarily practiced at the state level. However, little research has analysed why participation rates vary, sometimes drastically, between individual referendums in Germany. The following article addresses this research gap with an analysis of a new aggregate dataset of participation in referendums in the federal states between 1946 and 2019. Based on the Rational Choice Theory of voting, three main factors may explain the variance in participation rates. Higher participation rates can be anticipated when the expected benefit for voters is high (state‐initiated referendums, constitutional or restructuring referendums); when the participation costs are reduced (by combining referendums with salient parallel elections); and when the result is expected to be close. The article demonstrates the analytical usefulness of the Rational Choice Approach. It can serve as a starting point for future empirical referendum participation research, which is hardly developed in Germany, especially at the individual level.

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