Radical Right-Wing Populist Digital Politics in Portugal, Spain, and Brazil

• In Event: Populist Politics

Abstract

Despite often being normatively described as opposed to pluralism (e.g.: Müller, 2016), the rule of law, and other tenets of liberal democracy, the fact is that radical right-wing movements have now been normalized as features of Western democracies (Mondon & Winter, 2020). The 21st century has witnessed the introduction of the “fourth wave” of these movements, which has been able to achieve the electoral success that eluded their predecessors by fusing elements of the traditional far-right with populist communication strategies, giving way to contemporary radical right-wing populism (RRP) (Mudde, 2019). This phenomenon’s occurrence coincided with major shifts in media systems, which have become more fragmented and complex, necessitating that political actors adapt to the constant reconfiguration of the way the media operates through the combination of old and new media logics to get their point across to potential voters (Chadwick, 2013), namely by leveraging digital politics, i.e., the way potential supporters are reached, courted, and mobilized online (Vaccari, 2013).
However, political science research on the relationship between these issues has, with few exceptions, restricted its focus to older, wealthier, technologically developed democracies and relied on theoretical frameworks such as the modernization and diffusion theories to generalize its findings (Vaccari & Valeriani, 2018). This paper aims to address research gaps left by this restrictive focus by studying the communicative strategies employed by RRP political actors in digital politics in Portugal, Spain, and Brazil - namely their foremost protagonists, respectively, André Ventura (“Chega”, Portugal), Santiago Abascal (“Vox”, Spain), and Jair Bolsonaro (Independent, Brazil). In doing so, this paper extends the scope of application of the digital politics framework by following a diverse case selection approach (Seawright & Gerring, 2008), which allows for significant similarities and differences between the countries to emerge and inform the analysis – including the fact that the aforementioned framework has not been applied to any of the three countries, the fact that RRP political actors have had different degrees of success and different constraints, the longer history of the movement in Brazil than in the Iberian countries which had previously been thought of as exceptional cases of resistance to RRP growth (e.g.: Salgado and Zúquete, 2016; Turnbull-Dugarte, 2019) but can now be conceived as edge-cases (Mendes & Dennison, 2020), and differences in institutional settings, political organization and party systems.
The empirical approach employs a three-pronged approach focusing on the communicative strategies of relevant political actors and the constraints to message formation they face: first, utterances made by the relevant actors are collected – using the rtweet package for RStudio (Kearney, 2019) from February to May, 2021, a routine period where no elections or political campaigns are scheduled in the relevant countries - and subjected to a two-step content analysis recognizing their situatedness (Wodak, 2015), consisting of an entry-level analysis taking thematic dimensions as central analytical category, namely the discourse topics alluded to, and an in-depth analysis focusing on the specific text’s genre, discursive strategies and argumentation schemes; then the same content analysis techniques are turned on the content of party or movement websites, which will also be assessed in terms of their capabilities for distributing information, encouraging participation, and site delivery – following and updating Vaccari’s (2013) framework; finally, the empirical findings from the previous analyses are complemented and contextualized via the results of a thorough review of extant literature focused on the constraints to message formation faced by RRP political actors in different contexts.
The research design allows for a comprehensive analysis of the rhetoric and preferred topics of RRP political actors in Portugal, Spain, and Brazil in digital politics, and thus to place these protagonists among the wider radical right-wing populist movement, which has been characterized in other European and American countries, while also updating Vaccari’s framework for approaching digital politics, which is rooted on the early days of the web 2.0 and mainly focused on party websites, rather than their activity on social media. In approaching the Portuguese case, this research also strengthens scholarly understanding of nascent RRP political movements, providing an enriching counterpoint to extant literature on the subject, which tends to focus on more established movements (e.g.: van Kessel, 2019).

Author

• Afonso Biscaia, Instituto de Ciências Sociais - Universidade de Lisboa