Exploring Populist Communication & Performances Online: A Multi-Method Approach

• In Event: Populist Politics

Abstract

The recent success of populist politicians in Western democracies is partly based on their emotive portrayal of a Manichean vision of society juxtaposing a corrupt and self-serving elite with a pure, virtuous and exploited people. Despite this core definitional component, scholars question whether contemporary populism clearly articulates fully developed visions of society. They argue populism constitutes a frame, messaging style or political strategy which requires an attached comprehensive host ideology. We challenge the characterization of populism as a strategy or thin ideology (e.g. Mudde, 2004), suggesting instead that contemporary varieties of populism, especially those on the political right, indeed do offer a more comprehensive vision of society and politics. This view supersedes the mono-dimensional people vs. elites frame commonly associated with populism and instead grounds political claims in a thicker, more substantive notion of collective identity—namely, the ethnic nation-state.

Drawing on research in political communication and social & political psychology, we argue that today’s populism is laden with frames claiming that ordinary people are simultaneously struggling against a globally-corrupted elite and allegedly dangerous groups of ethnic and religious others that threaten the survival and future prosperity of the “heartland” (e.g. Taggart, 2004). Social identity (e.g. Hogg & Abrams, 1988; Tajfel & Turner, 1986) and self-categorization theories (Turner, 198) aid us to argue populist politics are sustained by the frequent invocation of distinctly national symbols that help individuals derive a portion of their identity from awareness of their membership in a national community. The symbols are a salient referent for collective identity formation on the right.

Research suggests the potential for mobilization based on collective identity is enhanced when politicians frame national identity as threatened by the unpatriotic machinations of global elites and “welfare” immigration (e.g. Canetti et al., 2015). We argue the power of populist mobilization rests on this rhetorical double-move, where politicians deploy national symbols to amplify feelings of national attachment among target groups and accentuate the presence of threats to heighten feelings of national attachment and support for their nationalist policy program.

To support our claims, we engage in a multimethod, two-part comparative study of populist performances on Twitter. We analyze over 3 million tweets from 878 twitter accounts interested in tweeting about French electoral politics, German right-wing mobilization and the American far right from 2017-2019. We begin with longitudinal content analysis using Structural Topic Modeling which enables a systematic look at everyday populist-nationalist political communication. We then shift to an examination of the type of user engaged in populist online messaging by comparing the twitter profiles of 300 of the accounts. Building on recently developed methods for the relational coding of tweets and users (e.g. Dann 2010; Hughes et al. 2014), we deploy a form axial coding where we place the category of populism in the center of analysis and develop a set of relationships around it, enabling us to make connections between different codes and to build explanatory models (Glaser & Strauss, 2009). We believe this two-pronged approach can be a model for research into the political communication of relevant groups, helping to answer questions about the sustenance of online movements and the coalescence of identities around particular frames.

Our analysis first reveals the success of contemporary populism rests on the relative prominence of national symbols and the promotion of an exclusionary notion of collective national identity in its everyday discourse. Economic deprivation and disillusionment over neoliberal globalization frames are present but subordinate to distinctly nationalist frames. Second, populist-nationalism online emerges as a performative act—an expression of agency whereby users constitute themselves through the mundane, everyday practice of sharing political information within loosely connected and overlapping networks of individuals. Social rewards are bestowed upon those who, by inspiring emotional responses through celebrating the nation and denigrating the liberal elite—for example, by employing memetic signifiers (Gerbaudo, 2015)—support the development and perpetuation of their particular conceptualization of the nation. This suggests populist-nationalism is more than a thin carrier ideology; it is generative of a deeper ideological lifeworld for those who practice it. Lastly, we observe overlap in both the topics that sustain populist communication and self-expression practices in profiles across national contexts. This suggests that populist-nationalism, despite its rhetorical focus on particular national identities, constitutes a transnational phenomenon.

Authors

• Michael Habegger, University of Delaware

• Tobias Lemke, University of Delaware