Populism in context. A cross-country investigation of the Facebook usage of populist appeals during the 2019 European Parliament elections

Abstract

Recent scholarship demonstrated that Facebook is a fertile space for populist political communication as its unmediated and viral nature make populist appeals highly efficient in mobilizing voters (Engesser et al., 2017). However, less attention has been paid to the way these populist messages appear through political actors’ Facebook communication, and what post- and page-level factors they are associated with. We investigate these questions in the context of the 2019 European Parliament (EP) election based on a unique cross-national dataset covering 12 European countries. In this study we categorized more than 8,000 Facebook posts published on the main Facebook pages of 67 parties. Our findings show that different forms of populist communication are used in strategically different ways and appear in different communication contexts. Anti-elitist messages are articulated in relation to economy, labor and social policy and immigration mostly by extreme parties. People-centrism is frequently used in relation to labor and social policy, and in European-focused posts all over the political landscape. Full-fledged populist communication (which combines anti-elitism and people-centrism) appear in economy, social policy and immigration related posts and in far-right parties’ communication.