Why do People Agree with Populists? A comparative study on attitudes and social media use (original) (raw)

This working paper examined citizens’ reactions to populism. It also verified whether anti-elite populist narratives have an impact on citizens’ trust in politics and institutions. Additionally, the research investigated the success of populist content on Facebook by means of reactions. Given the different purposes, this study relied on both quantitative and qualitative methods such as focus groups, quantitative text analysis (i.e., digital dashboard) and a survey experiment. Focus groups research with over 80 participants in Turkey, Spain, France, Poland and the UK revealed that citizens who support both populist and mainstream parties distrust politicians in general and share a feeling of poor political representation even in countries led by populist parties such as Poland and Turkey. The digital dashboard analysis in France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the UK found that social media users are more likely to imitate populist language when populist politicians use populist rhetoric in their posts. Conversely, when populist themes are used by mainstream politicians in their Facebook communication, their followers are less likely to use populist language. For this quantitative text analysis, we considered 31,541 posts (and their related 11 million user comments), published between March and July 2021 on 122 Facebook pages of political parties – populist and mainstream. The experimental survey studied the links between zero-sum thinking (e.g., “a gain for them is a loss for us”) and populist attitudes and support for populist parties. Five online studies were carried out in the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Poland with over 2,100 participants selected through the platform Prolific Academic. Results were successful only in the Italian and French samples. Still, where the experimental manipulation of four randomly assigned conditions did not elicit a significant change in zero-sum beliefs (ZSB) ratings, it significantly affected ratings for one item on the ZSB scale. Gender emerged as a powerful predictor of ZSB, with males scoring higher than both females and participants identifying with other genders. And ZSB emerged as central predictors of populist attitudes, agreement with populist politicians, and intention to vote for a populist party. Given that anti-immigrant rhetoric in the guise of zero-sum beliefs is common in right-wing populist discourse, this is no surprise. But it does suggest that a bad environment or the presence of perceived ‘out-groups’ can trigger resource-protection attitudes.