Populist Communication Styles in the 2019 European Parliament Election

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals. This project explores this for the 2019 European Parliamentary election, which may be a particularly easy target for anti-elitist populist communication, and less so for people-centred communication.

The question here is how this plays out at the page and post level on Facebook. The hypothesis is that extreme left and right party groups are more likely to employ populist communication, as are opposition parties. The project tested this with a manual content analysis of the Facebook posts from 75 parties in 12 countries that were published in the last four weeks of the EP campaign. Anti-elitism was prominent on issues like the economy, labour and social matters, and immigration; references to ‘the people’ were prominent for labour and social policies and the European level; and exclusions of our-groups were prominent for immigration issues. Environment policy did not attract populist communication. Appeal as to the people were also strong in mobilisation-focussed posts.

Only the mainstream left and right parties did not employ anti-elitist tropes; Greens parties used anti-elitism, but not references to ‘the people’ or exclusive language about out-groups. Overall, then, populist communication is not a unified communication style, but used strategically and contextually across diverse parties and issues.