What do Populists Tweet? Interrogating Competing Frames in the #Chemnitz Protest

• In Event: Populist Communication

Abstract

The rise of populist parties and their discourses across North America and much of Western Europe has renewed interest in the study of populism both inside out outside academia. Researchers are contributing to a long-standing tradition of populism studies to assess the philosophical foundations of contemporary populism (Müller 2016), the strategic use of populist frames among elite groups (Hameleers et al. 2016), populist attitudes among the electorate (Elchardus & Spruyt 2016; Kriesi et al. 2016), as well as the effects of populism on governance (Weyland 2018). However, investigations into the case-specific nature of populist frames in contemporary political discourse remain the exception. What does populism actually look like in conversation and how can populist narratives achieve discursive dominance in the highly-fragmented media ecology of the 21st century? Questions regarding the social breadth and reach of populist narratives are particularly salient given the purported role of social media platforms and their associated affordances in political mobilization and the construction of programmatically shallow movements (Gerbaudo 2012, 2015; Tufekci 2012, 2017; MacDonald 2015).

This paper seeks to provide answers to the above questions by undertaking an in-depth analysis of one such case of populist agitation: the extensive conversations surrounding the trending Twitter hashtag, #Chemnitz, that captured mass media attention in September 2018. On 26 August, 2018 several persons were admitted to a hospital in the Saxon city of Chemnitz, where one German-born man died. Shortly thereafter, the primary suspect's arrest warrant was illegally leaked, posted online and disseminated through the web presences of several right-wing populist organizations, including Pro-Chemnitz, PEGIDA, and the Alternative für Deutschland. The document identified the alleged perpetrator as a 23-year-old Syrian male. Over the next several weeks, tens of thousands of people, fueled by the hashtag #Chemnitz, took to the streets in protest of, among other things, the pro-immigration policy of the German government.

While the events continue to generate fallout in German politics, we argue that the case provides a snapshot view of both the nature of populist claims-making in the German context and an avenue to understanding how populist frames diffuse across social media platforms. We exploit a dataset of more than 90,000 tweets containing the hashtag #Chemnitz published over a 2-day span in the week following the leak to identify the most important topics of discussion and to trace the emergence and submergence of particular frames over time.

Our snapshot view enables us to address the research questions through multiple approaches. First, we begin with a descriptive analysis of the prominent frames that sustained the online conversation surrounding #Chemnitz. Structural Topic Modeling—a form of computer aided textual analysis oriented toward identifying the most important words associated with distinct groups of documents—reveals a number of populist topics that touch upon the idea that the “real” German people have not been properly cared for by Merkel’s government. Other prominent substantive topics that appear to sustain engagement include, broadly, Islamophobia, Euroskepticism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Importantly, a number of counternarratives contending that the protesters are reminiscent of Nazis and do not represent contemporary German national identity are also conspicuous in the Twitter conversation. So, while the anti-immigrant Briton Katie Hopkins enjoys extraordinary significance in the dataset and reveals a transnational dimension to populist discourse, influential members of the Green Party appropriated #Chemnitz to assert a different (i.e. non-populist) narrative.

Second, the longitudinal aspect of the dataset allows us to trace the flow of the conversation and draw causal inferences about the type of frames that seem travel most effectively throughout the #Chemnitz conversations. Accordingly, we argue that contemporary populist discourse, especially in the European context, is not limited to class-based conception of politics that pitches “the people” against elites; rather, it is driven primarily by competing tribal national identity categories. Moreover, inflammatory trolling statements voiced by well-connected brokers are the most likely tweets to diffuse in the dataset over time, which is reflected in the most representative tweets and relative durability of the most incendiary topics.

This study might serve as a replicable template for the study of 21st century populism. Previous work by the authors shows that similar diffusion dynamics of populist and nationalist frames are present across national contexts. Some messages are better suited to particular forms of media than others. Systematically identifying what these messages are, as we do, can help experts and scholars to more precisely identify an instance of populism.

Authors

• Tobias Lemke, University of Delaware

• Michael Habegger, University of Delaware