Populism à la Carte: The paradoxical political communication of Narendra Modi on Twitter

Abstract

How and where is democracy ‘hacked’? Studies examining the variability of the populist discourse rely on the—often tacit—assumption that global digital platforms are used similarly from one country to the other. By examining political rhetoric on Twitter, we show that populist communication is tailored to a particular audience profile rather than a particular social media (SM). More specifically, we compare Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tweets with his addresses on multiple mediums. We describe how Modi uses wide‐reaching media such as radio to unfold a populist narrative based on institutional disintermediation, layman's language, counselling and the staging of an intimate conversation with the masses. Modi uses more elitist and cosmopolitan SM sites in India, such as Twitter, to mitigate his populist credentials, and introduce himself as a respectable democratic leader favouring multilateral collaborations, banal nationalism and Gandhian peace‐building. The variability of his political rhetoric across seven address formats indicates that Modi is populist tactically rather than ideologically, which complicates the tenets of the dominant ‘ideational’ populist paradigm. To further ground our argument empirically, we venture into comparing Modi's and Trump's tweets. We suggest that due to the popularity of Twitter in the United States, it was strategically useful for the former President of the United States to act populist on the platform, while that is not the case for Modi. This tends to indicate that not enough attention is given to intermedium studies that complement comparisons between states/regions with comparisons nested within a coherent political space.

Social Media as E-governance

“…Twitter is a space for "the elite," a platform where the powerful have conversations that have a ripple effect on news. While critical research on the use of Twitter by Indian politicians and political parties has expanded substantially over the last decade (Martelli and Jumle 2023;Pal, Chandra, and Vydiswaran 2016;Rao 2018), there has not been a concomitant growth in critical assessments of the institutional use of social media by governmental entities in India; this paper seeks to fill this gap by drawing on critical social media studies. Literature on social media use across the globe demonstrates that the use of social media is intended to lead towards greater transparency (Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes 2010) and can generate more positive citizen attitudes to government than government websites (Porumbescu 2016).…”