Populist online communication: introduction to the special issue

Engesser, Sven; Fawzi, Nayla; Larsson, Anders

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2017.1328525

Cited by 305 publications

(278 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…): They provide direct access to the public without external interference; they offer the possibility of establishing a close and direct connection to the people; they foster the potential for targeted, personalized forms of communication; and they can create a feeling of community, belonging and recognition among otherwise scattered groups (see also Engesser et al. ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bipolar Populism? The Use of Anti‐Elitism and People‐Centrism by Swiss Parties on Social Media

Ernst

Engesser

Esser

2017

Swiss Political Sci Review

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confidence: 99%

Bipolar Populism? The Use of Anti‐Elitism and People‐Centrism by Swiss Parties on Social Media

Ernst

Engesser

Esser

2017

Swiss Political Sci Review

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“…(@matteorenzi, May 12, 2015) 5 Against this backdrop, the body of literature investigating populism has been constantly growing. On the other hand, few studies have analysed the relationship between populism and social media (Engesser et al 2017a). Although all parties benefit from the use of the internet when communicating with the electorate, populist groups are the ones who particularly take advantage of it (Bartlett 2014).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, several studies have defined the style of communication that characterises populism (Canovan 1999;Bos et al 2011;Kramer 2014). As suggested by Engesser et al (2017a), there are three major aspects that characterise populist discourse: simplification, emotionalization, and negativity. These three factors strongly benefit populist leaders since they allow to catch people's attention on the Internet, a place where users are often overwhelmed by the amount of information and content (cf.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of The Correlation Between Populist Discourse and Tweet Popularity

Carrella

2018

CNP

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This paper analyses linguistic features present in populist discourse on Twitter, together with the relationship that these may have with the popularity obtained by the tweets. The preliminary part of this study was conducted on tweets collected from the official accounts of four European populist leaders, namely Luigi Di Maio, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, and Nigel Farage. This phase suggested that particular discursive elements often related to populism, such as emotionalization, simplistic rhetoric and intensified evaluations, are present on social media as well. However, the main focus was on the possible correlation between these aspects and the number of "likes" and "retweets" that a single tweet receives. Therefore, tweets were firstly classified by a popularity value, and then divided in two groups, creating a corpus of most and least popular tweets for each subject. Secondly, tweets were annotated using the Appraisal Framework (Martin and White 2005), in order to observe the existence of a peculiar linguistic behaviour by populist leaders. The same operation was conducted on a control group formed by three establishment politicians, namely Matteo Renzi, François Hollande, and David Cameron. Finally, the annotations of the most and the least popular tweets were compared to highlight features that were particularly frequent in popular tweets. This process showed how specific "populist" features, such as emotions, negative judgments, or intensified evaluations are related with the attention received by users on social media. Findings indicate that these features are positively correlated with the tweet popularity, both when considering populist and non-populist politicians. As a matter of fact, reference subjects were the ones who showed a stronger presence of populist-related features Fabio Carrella in popular tweets. This leads to believe that the stylistic distance between establishment and populist parties is reducing, and that also non-populist leaders are taking advantage of particular discursive elements that better catch the attention of the social media audience.

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“…These populist and right-wing parties have become a focus in scholarly literature on parties' use of the web (e.g. Engesser et al 2017; Hartleb 2020 in this volume; Thuermer 2020 in this volume). Many analyses so far, focused on opposition parties, who have the classical role and function of attacking the competitor.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tactical Web Use in Bumpy Times – a Comparison of Conservative Parties’ Digital Presence

Borucki¹,

Fitzpatrick²

2019

Preprint

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Facing the ubiquitous and asynchronous nature of digital communication and interaction, parties face the challenge to migrate to some extent into the digital (Fitzpatrick 2018). This is not the case for election campaigns, but for the time in-between elections due to reasons for raising funds and other resources. These processes often rely on the digital sphere. Parties are not only challenged by relocating their communication strategies in normal times into new vessels, but also to encounter increased interactional demands by their target groups - members and supporters (Scarrow 2015). This comes along with the well-researched decline of established parties due to different societal causes (van Biezen, Poguntke 2014; Whiteley 2011, Montigny 2015). Parties’ adaptation of information and communication technologies (ICT) poses another challenge: How to migrate into the digital without losing those who are already engaged offline? How can parties manage to get the best out of both worlds – online and offline – and meet the demands of their adherents? These questions are connected to the research of intra-party democracy (e.g. Close et al. 2017; Faucher and Boy 2018; Bernardi et al. 2017) and leadership (Poguntke and Webb 2005; Musella 2018) as well as to research on parties’ virtual presence (e.g. Römmele 2003).We seek to understand how parties operate online in terms of building relationships between the organization and its members as well as fostering relationships between individual adherents. To grasp what is going on, we analyze parties’ websites and Facebook fan pages. We follow a comparative approach by conducting a pair-comparison. Our cases are the British Conservative Party and the German Christian Democratic Union with a panel data set from 2013 to 2018. Both parties hold governmental responsibility and face national turmoil within their countries. We analyze websites because we assume them serving as a hub of information and exchange for members and supporters. This allows us to investigate how both channels of ICTs are used either to disseminate information or to establish dialogue and discourse on platform media.

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Populist online communication: introduction to the special issue

Cited by 305 publications

References 63 publications

Bipolar Populism? The Use of Anti‐Elitism and People‐Centrism by Swiss Parties on Social Media

Bipolar Populism? The Use of Anti‐Elitism and People‐Centrism by Swiss Parties on Social Media

Analysis of The Correlation Between Populist Discourse and Tweet Popularity

Tactical Web Use in Bumpy Times – a Comparison of Conservative Parties’ Digital Presence

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