Populist Attitudes and Political Media Use

• In Event: Populist Communication

Abstract

The rise in populist politicians and parties coincided with the emergence of new media as a political communication tool in the 1990s. More recently, social media have contributed to the proliferation of populist messages in American elections and in governing as illustrated by the election and presidency of Donald Trump. There have been extensive inquiries into the meaning of populism, the reasons for its current rise, and populism’s influence on government and public policy. Research has explored the ways in which politicians have used social media to forward populist agendas, especially by examining messages on social media platforms. Fewer studies have examined the nature and prevalence of populist attitudes among the mass public. Thus, this study addresses the basic question: What is the relationship between people’s populist attitudes and their use of political media? The paper will explore specifically the questions: What are the populist attitudes held by social media users and traditional media users? Are people who hold populist attitudes more likely to use social media than people who do not have populist affinities? In what ways does social media use correspond to partisanship, ideology, and affinity for populist politicians?

There is an assumption articulated in the scholarly literature that characteristics of social media are conducive to the promulgation of populist messages which makes social media platforms especially appealing to citizens who hold populist attitudes. Social media allow politicians to circumvent gatekeepers and communicate directly to the public which conforms to populist expectations of rule by the people and anti-establishment ideals. Populist politicians can use social media to readily convey emotional and fear appeals that play into perceptions of injustice, generate outrage, and define enemies. However, research indicates that the relationship between the public’s social media use and populism is more complex and is tempered by partisan preferences and feelings about candidates. For example, Groshek and Koc-Michalska (2017) find that the most active social media users in the 2016 presidential election were more supportive of Democratic populist candidates than Republican populists, and that the most active social media users were less likely to support Donald Trump. Further, support for populists differs depending on the particular social media used as well as a person’s exposure to traditional political media.

The research questions in this study will be examined using data from an original national survey of the American public online that will be conducted in March of 2019. The study will be fielded via Mechanical Turk (taking steps to mitigate the limitations of the platform, see Huff and Tingley, 2015). The survey will employ a battery of questions tapping respondents’ populist attitudes that will be informed by prior research (e.g. Akkerman, Mudde, and Zaslove, 2013; Andreadis, 2018) as well as items measuring respondents’ social media use, traditional/legacy media use, attitudes toward specific candidates and politicians, partisan and ideological preferences, and other political orientations, such as a sense of political efficacy and civic duty.

Author

• Diana M. Owen, Georgetown University