Visual Populism: A Comparative Analysis of 28 Countries’ Party Facebook Pages

• In Event: Populist Politics

Abstract

Visual Populism: A Comparative Analysis of 28 Countries’ Party Facebook Pages from the ‘19 EP Campaign
Xénia Farkas, Paweł Baranowski, Márton Bene, Daniel Jackson, Uta Russmann, Anastasia Veneti

The paper investigates the differences and similarities between populist and non-populist actors’ social media-based visual communication. Recent studies have described that social media, especially Facebook is a prominent area of populist communication (Engesser, Ernst, Esser, Büchel, 2017; Ernst, Blassnig, Engesser, Büchel and Esser, 2019). However, studies on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have focused primarily on textual elements, whilst works examining the visual elements in social media –with a few exception (see Haim & Jungblut, 2020; Hokka & Nelimarkka, 2019)– are mainly limited to single countries (Mendonça & Caetano, 2020; Baldwin-Philippi, 2018). Admittedly, research on the visual aspects of political communication is a current topic among academics (e.g. Schill 2012; Veneti, Jackson & Lilleker, 2019; Bucy & Joo, 2020). Various studies have demonstrated the resonant power of images to evoke strong emotions (e.g. Coleman & Wu, 2015), to act as a source of political information that is processed quickly (e.g Graber 1996), and to shape attitudes and behaviours (e.g. Banducci et al., 2008), which populist parties focus on, in particular.

Thus, to provide more generalizable understanding on populist visual communication, the present study applies a quantitative visual content analysis on a random sample (N= 1137) of all EU countries’ image-based political communication in the 2019 European Parliamentary campaign on party Facebook pages. To describe the populist and non-populist visual tools and features, a detailed coding scheme has been developed with variables such as the type of the images (e.g., flyer, photo, photo with text), their context, the depicted actors, symbols (e.g., flags) and objects (e.g. microphone, election ballot) are distinguished. Accordingly, we apply de Vreese, Esser, Aalberg, Reinemann and Stanyer’s (2018) approach and define populism as a communication phenomenon, a mix of content and style, where latter aspect is supplemented here with Moffitt’s (2016) political style approach that allows us to focus on the symbolically mediated performances, and specifically the visual aspects.

As the paper focuses on the similarities and differences of populist and non-populist actors’ visual communication, populist actors are predetermined by the literature. Further, it is also acknowledged that not only populist actors can apply a populist communication style (Bossetta, 2017). Hence, although the empirical study is actor-focused, based on the concept and characteristics of populism, some hypotheses are formulated related to the types of visual elements expected to be more often used by populists. Some of the hypotheses are listed here: Since simplification and negative messages are key features of populist communication (Moffitt, 2016), it is hypothesised that (H1) photos without text are less used in populist communication than photos with text which are more common due to their ability to create more specific, simpler and negative messages. It is also hypothesized that (H2) the context of the images is more often negative than positive in the case of populist parties, due to the importance of arousing negative emotions towards ‘the elite’ or ‘the others’ (Mudde, 2004). Due to the ordinariness of populist politicians and their aspiration to resemble to ‘the people’, it is assumed that (H3) personal images with family members are more frequent in the case of populist parties, since these can highlight their resemblance and connection to ‘the people’. In contrast, (H4) political work images that demonstrate the traditional, non-populist political work are assumed to be more common among non-populist parties. Based on the personalized and leader-centric characteristics of populism (Moffitt, 2016), it is assumed that (H5) populist parties more frequently depict their own party leaders. Further, connections with ‘the people’ are investigated from multiple approaches and it is assumed that (H6) interaction with crowds, or random people, selfies, and approving audiences are more often depicted by populist parties.
The coding of the 1137 Facebook posts of parties from the 28 EU countries will be completed in February 2021 in order to be able to present the first results of this project at APSA 2021.

Authors

• Xénia Farkas, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Acedemy of Sciences

• Marton Bene, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Science

• Uta Russmann, FHWien University of Applied Sciences of WKW

• Anastasia Veneti, Bournemouth University