Media–Polity Relations and Populist Electoral Success

• In Event: Populism and the Reshaping of the Post-War Political Order in Europe

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to test the assumption that the condition leading to populist actors’ political success is the relative coherence and concentration of their relationships to media compared to their opponents’.
Although the literature on the relationship between democracy, populism, and media is rich, the interactions between actors in polity and media have not been sufficiently conceptualised and operationalised. Drawing on core insights of relational epistemology, this paper attempts to fill the gap. It tests the assumption by combining process tracing and social network analysis coupled with WEYLAND’s adjusted definition of populism as political strategy on two of the most consequential cases of populist challengers’ electoral success in Europe: the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2010 Hungarian general elections (resulting in the first two-thirds legislative supermajority of ORBÁN Viktor’s Fidesz party).
The finding is that populism can be successfully linked to networked special interest and patronage politics — giving the term a distinctive, vastly consequential meaning and usage. This paper, by suggesting a novel, universally applicable comparative framework for understanding and forecasting populist politics, puts the causes and effects of the Brexit referendum and the 2010 Hungarian general elections into an insightful, new perspective. Therefore, this research infers far-reaching policy implications with regards to democracy, rule of law, competition, and media regulation on all national, European, and international levels.

Author

• Máté Mátyás, Corvinus University of Budapest