Research has shown that citizens with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively, and there is also suggestive evidence that they rely less on established news sources like the legacy press. However, due to data limitations, there is still no solid evidence whether populist citizens have skewed news diets in the contemporary high-choice digital media environment. In this paper, we rely on the selective exposure framework and investigate the relationship between populist attitudes and the consumption of various types of online news. To test our theoretical assumptions, we link 150 million Web site visits by 7,729 Internet users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to their responses in an online survey. This design allows us to measure media exposure more precisely than previous studies while linking these data to demographic attributes and political attitudes of participants. The results show that populist attitudes leave pronounced marks in people's news diets, but the evidence is heterogeneous and highly contingent on the supply side of a country's media system. Most importantly, citizens with populist attitudes visit less Web sites from the legacy press, while consuming more hyperpartisan news. Despite these tendencies, the Web tracking data show that populist citizens still primarily get their news from established sources. We
How transnational are the audiences of far right parties and movements on Twitter? While an increasing number of contributions addresses the topic of transnationalism in far right politics, few systematic investigations exist on the actors and discourses favored in transnational exchanges on social media. Building on the literature on the far right, social movements, transnationalism and the Internet, the paper addresses this gap by studying the initiators and the issues that are favored in online exchanges between audiences of far right organizations, e.g. political parties and movements across France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. We use a new dataset on the activities of far right Twitter users that is analyzed through a mixed methods approach. Using social network analysis, we detect transnational links between far right organizations across countries based on retweets from audiences of far right Twitter users. Retweets are qualitatively coded for content and compared to the content retweeted within national communities. Finally, using a logistic regression, we quantify the level to which specific issues and organizations enjoy high levels of attention across borders. Subsequently, we use discourse analysis to qualitatively reconstruct the interpretative frames accompanying these patterns. We find that although social media are often ascribed much power in favoring transnational exchanges between far right organizations, there is little evidence of this. Only a few issues (anti-immigration and nativist interpretations of the economy) garner transnational far right audiences on Twitter. In addition, we find that more than movements, political parties play a prominent role in the construction of a transnational far right discourse.
When debates about Islam acquire importance in the public sphere, does the far right adhere to traditional racist arguments, risking marginalization, or does it conform to mainstream values to attain legitimacy in the political system? Focusing on the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, I explore the framing of Islam, discussing how the far right’s nativist arguments were reformulated to engage with available discursive opportunities and dominant conceptions of the national identity. By looking at actors in the protest and the electoral arenas, I examine the interplay between the choice of anti-Islam frames and baseline national values.I offer a novel mixed-method approach to study political discourses, combining social network analysis of the links between seventy-seven far-right websites with a qualitative frame analysis of online material. It also includes measures of online visibility of these websites to assess their audiences. The results confirm that anti-Islam frames are couched along a spectrum of discursive opportunity, where actors can either opt to justify opposition to Islam based on interpretations of core national values (culture and religion) or mobilize on strictly oppositional values (biological racism). The framing strategy providing most online visibility is based on neo-racist arguments. While this strategy allows distortion of baseline national values of secularity and republicanism, without breaching the social contract, it is also a danger for organizations that made “opposition to the system” their trademark. While the results owe much to the French context, the conclusions draw broader implications as to the far right going mainstream.
Identifying and explaining change in the structure of central state bureaucracies and the determinants of survival of individual public organizations are two closely related areas of research in public administration. We aim to bridge the gap between these two main strands of studies of organizational change by presenting a novel approach to collecting event history data for public organizations. We have developed this framework as part of the Structure and Organisation of Governments Project, which aims to map entire central state bureaucracies in three Western European countries. Our approach is flexible enough to describe macro-trends in public sector organization populations and to explain these trends by analysing the event histories of the organizations they comprise. In addition to presenting our framework and how we applied it to create this data set, we also present some initial cross-national comparisons of the distribution of the event types recorded, highlighting initial findings and promising avenues for further research. Points for practitioners We present here a novel approach for representing the structural changes that organizations and sub-departments experience over time that can apply to any hierarchical organization (public or private). Applying the approach illuminates the historical development of organizations and their parts, and allows cross-national comparisons of events and trends across organizations. Our comparison of ministerial organizations in France, Germany and the Netherlands from 1980 to 2013 shows that trends in the size of bureaucracies mask considerable structural changes within.
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