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Today, it has become almost impossible to read the news without noticing a reference to populism. Scholarly interest in this transnational phenomenon has been growing because an increasing number of politicians and parties are apparently resorting to populist communication repertoires. Several studies analyzed the utilization of populist rhetoric (e.g., Wodak, 2015), populist messages (e.g., Rooduijn, 2014), or populist communication styles (e.g., Jagers & Walgrave, 2007) and demonstrated that investigating populist communication is crucial to fully understand the rise of political populism, as populism is mostly reflected in the oral, written, and visual communication of political actors (Aalberg & de Vreese, 2017). In a hybrid (Chadwick, 2017) or high choice media environment (van Aelst et al., 2017), politicians have gained new options for action because they have a greater number of communication channels-which differ in their affordances-at their disposal. Hence, it has become increasingly difficult to understand the role of a single medium in isolation (Bode & Vraga, 2017). These difficulties call for a comparative analysis that considers different media systems and different channel types. This type of analysis is especially important in the context of populism because there is conclusive empirical evidence that features of specific media channels influence the amount of populist communication (Bos & Brants, 2014; Cranmer, 2011; Ernst, Engesser, Büchel, Blassnig, & Esser, 2017). Our study compares the communicative self-presentation of political actors in three prototypical media channels for populism, Facebook, Twitter, and political talk shows, across six Western democracies. In addition to the particularities of the channels, we investigate whether the characteristics of a political party influence the amount of populist communication. Although populism in Western democracies is often associated with right-wing political actors, several studies with a wider scope have revealed that parties at both edges 823358S MSXXX10.1177/2056305118823358Social Media + SocietyErnst et al.

The aim of this study is to explore favorable opportunity structures for populist communication of politicians in Western democracies. We analyze the content and style of 2,517 statements from 103 politicians from six countries (France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States) who differ in their party affiliation (populist versus nonpopulist) and hierarchical position (backbencher vs. frontbencher). To learn more about their media strategies and chances of success, we investigate four communication channels (Facebook, Twitter, talk shows, and news media) that systematically differ in their degree of journalistic intervention and examine fourteen often-raised topics that differ in their suitability for populist mobilization. Our content analysis shows the highest probability of populist communication comes from (1) members of populist parties and (2) backbenchers who address (3) mobilizable issues in (4) social media or newspaper articles. We conclude by explaining why populists have become so successful in getting their messages into newspapers.

The persuasiveness of right-wing populist communication has become a widely discussed topic; it is often assumed that such messages might foster anti-immigrant attitudes among citizens. The present study explores the effects of the different components of right-wing populist communication—anti-immigrant messages, populist content, and populist style—on attitudes toward immigrants. By combining a media content analysis ( N = 605 articles) with a panel survey ( N = 1,968) in metropolitan areas of four Western European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom), this study analyzes how citizens’ attitudes toward immigrants are influenced by the right-wing populist communication with which they are confronted in their individual media diet. The results show that anti-immigrant statements in the media lead to more negative cognitions toward immigrants, while populist content leads to more negative emotions. The study, thus, demonstrates that not only anti-immigrant rhetoric but also populism as a thin-centered ideology influence citizens’ attitudes toward immigrants on top of pre-existing attitudes.