The Discursive Dimensions of Pernicious Polarization. Analysis of Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe on Twitter

Abstract

The objective of this research is to explore the political discourse of West European right-wing populist leaders in the perspective of pernicious polarization, focusing on their positions and argumentation styles. To achieve this, over 50,000 tweets from right-wing populist leaders in Western Europe (Italy, France and Spain) were collected for a period spanning from 2 July 2019, which marks the beginning of the 9th legislature of the European Parliament, to 2 July 2023. Employing Text Mining and Topic Modeling techniques, this research will reconstruct and comparatively analyze the topics addressed by the leaders from different countries and the dynamics of polarization discourse proposing an exploratory study aiming to locate the words of pernicious polarization used by each leader.

In-party love spreads more efficiently than out-party hate in online communities

“…Both of these processes have facilitated the creation of what have been denominated ‘epistemic bubbles’, which are social epistemic structures formed with no ill intent, through ordinary processes of social selection and community formation 22 . Finally, political parties are increasingly using social media to spread political discourse, which seems to be predominantly negative, discrediting political adversaries 4 , 5 , 36 . This trend has led to the formation of ‘echo chambers’ that systematically isolate their members by discrediting ideological and partisan outsiders 22 .…”

“…In this respect, Balcells and Padró-Solanet 12 argue that partisan/ideological homophily tends to increase when the majority of radical right-wing parties (RRPs) or candidates (populist and radical right parties) are dominating major social media networks 23 . This is because these types of parties use social media to attract attention and create a distraction from the mainstream party coverage via emotional and polarizing partisan messages 6 , 36 , 72 , 73 . However, this communication strategy is also common among other types of parties.…”