De-Konstruktion von Glaubwürdigkeit in Online-Debatten

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

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Chapter 1. Introduction

Borza,

Demata,

Filardo-Llamas

et al. 2023

Voices of Supporters

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In this book, we investigate how supporters of populist parties use social media to voice their endorsement in the context of the European elections 2019. What drives this study is the wish to understand the motivations of people to support and potentially vote for populist parties.Unlike the bulk of previous research, however, we do not seek explanations in the official discourse of such parties, but in the discourse of supporters themselves. We believe that analysing the voices of supporters, and linking them to party political communications, provides a more comprehensive account of the phenomenon of resurgent populism.Across the studies of different countries across Europe that make up the present volume, we focus on three aspects in particular. Firstly, we seek to identify what the language and visuals featured in social media comments, and the media practices around them, can tell us about what motivates people to vote for populist parties. Given the pan-European scope of the book, we also ask whether voter motivations are shared across different political contexts within Europe. Secondly, we discuss what role national identities and values play in motivating supporters to vote for populist parties. Again, we address the question if the data analysed in the different chapters indicate the emergence of a pan-European identity. Finally, we analyse how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters' social media comments so that they are meaningful and constitute a voting motivation.Given that this book is hopefully of interest not only to linguists but also to political scientists, communication and media scholars, sociologists and historians, we have included a glossary with definitions of technical terms and examples to illustrate their use in discourse.Readers can find this glossary at the beginning of the book. In the following, we will provide some background to the 2019 European elections. We then make the case for focusing on those elections, for investigating the voices of supporters rather than politicians and for analysing data from social media in particular. We will then discuss the methodologies that link the

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De-Konstruktion von Glaubwürdigkeit in Online-Debatten

Cited by 15 publications

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Just thank God for Donald Trump – Dialogue practices of populists and their supporters before and after taking office

Just thank God for Donald Trump – Dialogue practices of populists and their supporters before and after taking office

Voices of Supporters

Chapter 1. Introduction

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