Some remarks on the comparative experiment as a method in assessing populist political communication in Europe

Abstract

In this paper fundamental information concerning the designing and conducting of comparative experiments, as methods which are able to be employed in the field of media studies, will be successively delineated. On the basis of the large-scale online experiment conducted in 15 countries in 2017, the assessment of the populist message impact as well as methodological challenges to such a project will be presented. We discuss challenges and lessons learnt from this type of research design.

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“…The peculiarities of populist politicians in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Scandinavia have been discussed in a special issue of the Central European Journal of Communication (Stepinska, 2018). The dynamic development of populist parties, their usually quite short life cycles, and the differences in electoral cycles in each country might be the main reasons why most populism studies are single-case studies (see: Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008;Boss and Kees, 2014;Lees, 2018;Suiter et al, 2018) with a few exceptions of comparative studies (see : Schmidt, 2017, Kasprowicz andHess, 2019). This situation is determined by both the resources available for research and the objective need to assess the nature of populism in each particular country.…”