The Polarizing Impact of News Coverage on Populist Attitudes in the Public: Evidence From a Panel Study in Four European Democracies (original) (raw)
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C. Reinemann, J. Stanyer, T. Aalberg, F. Esser, & C. H. de Vreese (Eds.), Communicating Populism. Comparing Actor Perceptions, Media Coverage, and Effects on Citizens in Europe. London: Routledge, 2019
Why The Big Picture Matters: Political and Media Populism in Western Europe since the 1970s
While a vast theoretical literature argues that we live in populist times, the success of populism beyond its electoral dimension is rarely investigated empirically. This paper analyses the development of populism in five Western European countries (Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) from the 1970s to the 2010s. First, it measures whether political parties articulate populist discourses more and more often in their election manifestos. Second, the paper tests whether the presence of populism has increased over time in newspaper articles. The results show that populism is not a new phenomenon and that there is no linear increase over the decades. Moreover, while election manifestos are significantly more populist in the 2010s than in previous decades, populism in newspaper articles remains rather stable at a low level, suggesting that the media curb rather than foster populist discourses.
International Journal of Press/Politics 2018, Vol. 23(4) 517–538, 2018
Although populist communication has become pervasive throughout Europe, many important questions on its political consequences remain unanswered. First, previous research has neglected the differential effects of populist communication on the Left and Right. Second, internationally comparative studies are missing. Finally, previous research mostly studied attitudinal outcomes, neglecting behavioral effects. To address these key issues, this paper draws on a unique, extensive, and comparative experiment in sixteen European countries (N = 15,412) to test the effects of populist communication on political engagement. The findings show that anti-elitist populism has the strongest mobilizing effects, and anti-immigrant messages have the strongest demobilizing effects. Moreover, national conditions such as the level of unemployment and the electoral success of the populist Left and Right condition the impact of populist communication.
This article investigates the extent to which populist key messages are distributed via online news articles and reader comments, as well as how media actors, political actors, and readers employ populist online communication during election periods. Populism is defined as a thin ideology, and four dimensions of populist communication are distinguished: people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty, and exclusion. We analyze online news articles and reader comments during election campaigns in France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. We find that comment sections are more populist than online news articles and that the majority of populist key messages in online news articles originate from politicians, not from journalists. However, we further show that compared with straight news items, opinion-oriented stories are more prone to conveying populist key messages from media actors, whereas straight news favors populism by political actors. Finally, we investigate how online news media moderate populist key messages disseminated by political actors.
London: Routledge, 2019
Why do People Agree with Populists? A comparative study on attitudes and social media use
2022
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.
PLOS ONE, 2021
A politics of resentment has shaped a low-dialogue political environment in the United States, feeding into populism, and characterized by perceived distributive injustice, detachment between politicians and “the people”, and political polarization. In this political environment, independent of editorial lines, news can spread based on populist content features and drive the political divide even further. However, we still do not understand well, how the forces of political disconnect as well as potentially unifying elements such as political knowledge and the willingness to connect with the other (political) side predict audience interest in populist news featuring people-centrism, anti-elitism, restoring popular sovereignty, and the exclusion of others. To better understand what drives (dis-)interest in populist news features, we combined self-report data from a non-student US sample (N = 440) on political attitudes with unobtrusively measured data on their selective exposure to p...
Journalism and Media, 2022
Electoral contests around the world are suffering from an increasing distrust triggered by the dissemination of conspiracy theories. Extant research on political communication has largely studied this phenomenon, but, in some cases, it has neglected the relationship between social and legacy media in the breakthrough of a radicalized populism. Based on a wide literature review of liberal democracy and the roots of populism, this study addresses the right-wing populist communicative actions as one of the causes of the fragmentation of the democratic system, defining a journalistic and fact-checking standard to promote a well-informed society. Specifically, our research focus is to illustrate the impact of populist rhetoric on the traditional media system through a multiple-case study applied in European countries affected by right-wing populist discourse following the last United States elections (2020). The results show a connection among the strategies (game frames) used on Twitter, being less clear in the number of retweets and the presence on the front pages of newspapers. These data serve as a guide to build a journalistic indicator, arguing that high-quality information could be the key for democratic systems to minimize populist rhetoric and tackle the disinformation that endangers their future.