Hybrid media and populist currents in Ireland’s 2016 General Election

Abstract

Populism, or at the very least a 'populist zeitgeist' has advanced across the globe with populist actors from across the ideological spectrum at the forefront of politics in Europe, North and South America and Southeast Asia. One of the major components is the media and specifically hybrid media, which can inhibit or magnify populist political tendencies among both parties and voters. We utilised both hand-coded traditional media data and machine learning on social media data in order to disengage the hybrid media nuances for populist storytelling. We find that the media system in Ireland largely inhibits populist politics and messaging and thereby dampens all anti-out-group messaging. Thus, contrary to the literature identifying an inclination towards populism in some types of new media, and the emergence of media populism in similar media systems in the United States and the United Kingdom, we find that the Irish media, across all platforms, tend not to focus on populist messaging. In addition, the norms appear to bleed over to social media. These results are important because they potentially provide lessons for other European countries in covering populist actors and they contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of different kinds of media in the representation of populist politics.

Civil society, the media and the Internet: changing roles and challenging authorities in digital political communication ecologies

“…While in horizontal communication networks the status of an actor is still equated with their centrality in the communication flow, the position now depends on the connective choices of others. Media-centric studies (e.g., Suiter, Culloty, Greene, & Siapera, 2018) see the position of the media as largely intact, although it is changing in the face of an enlarged field of actors in the public sphere (Meraz, 2009). From the perspective of the present study, the question is whether the media retain this central role if we shift the focus to challengers and the communicative networks they establish.…”

El impacto de la ultraderecha en Twitter durante las elecciones españolas de 2019

“…El impacto de la ultraderecha en Twitter ha provocado que los partidos populistas gocen de mayor libertad en la crítica a las élites (Klinger & Svensson, 2015;Suiter et al, 2018).…”

Political Mobilisation of Religious, Chauvinist, and Technocratic Populists in Indonesia and Their Activities in Cyberspace

“…More research is needed to understand the role played by social media in spreading populism (Vreese et al 2018). However, the use of social media is thought to give more freedom to populists to attack elites (Klinger and Svensson 2015), and therefore has facilitated anti-elite populism (Suiter et al 2018). Also, social media communication tends to be more personal and emotional (Klinger and Svensson 2015;Enli 2017).…”