What Drives Populist Styles? Analyzing Immigration and Labor Market News in 11 Countries

Abstract

The success of populist political actors in Western democracies and the dramatization and emotionality of political communication in news media have been the object of several theoretical and empirical studies in the past decade. It has been argued that the mediatization of politics and the convergence of populist and tabloid communication styles foster these developments by mutual promotion in mass communication. This article uses a cross-national quantitative content analysis to disentangle associations among news genres, populist actors, content, and style. In spite of indisputable prevalence of populist styles in tabloid style media, populist ideology is identified as their strongest source.

Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys

“…6 Especially populist radical right parties and politicians like Donald Trump or Matteo Salvini criticize the mainstream media for political gains. As people with populist attitudes also have a higher likelihood of being a supporter of these parties ( Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018;Wettstein et al 2019), their media preferences could be shaped by these anti-media party cues (Ladd 2011). We therefore included a dummy variable indicating that a respondent identifies with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Brexit Party, Lega, Rassemblement National, the Republican Party, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), or VOX.…”

“…While there are methodological debates on the measurement of populist attitudes (Castanho Silva, Jungkunz, Helbling and Littvay, 2019;Wuttke et al 2020), such batteries can be used as an independent variable in crosscountry research (Wettstein, Schulz, Steenbergen, Schemer, Müller, Wirz and Wirth, 2020). Most prominently, populist attitudes transcend existing political cleavages and predict voting for populist radical left and right parties in many Western democracies (Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018;Wettstein et al 2019).…”

From Novelty to Normalization? How Journalists Use the Term “Fake News” in their Reporting

“…4 We mostly distinguished between political actors (e.g., from Austria, the United States, and Russia) and unpolitical and private actors. However, we also characterized one major group of political actors as populist by relying on previous studies that categorized parties and politicians as populist (e.g., Rooduijn et al 2019;Wettstein et al 2019). Accordingly, we characterized the following actors that appeared in our data set as populist: Donald Trump and his government, the Austrian party FPÖ and its splinter party the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), the Austrian government between the People's Party (ÖVP) and the FPÖ, the German Alternative for Germany (AfD), the French Front National, the Italian Five Star Movement and Forza Italia, the Hungarian party Fidesz, and all these parties' members.…”

Communicating Populism

“…A recent study shows, for example, that journalists, especially in tabloid newspapers, often present themselves as the voice of the people, portraying the people in a positive light and making advocative statements on their behalf. The same journalists also demonstrate an anti-establishment bias, portraying political elites in a negative light and making confl ictive statements toward them (Wettstein et al, 2018a) ( Figure 1.1 ).…”

“…Again, such comparative studies of populist communication have long been scarce. Only recently, scholars have made considerable progress in this respect by applying internationally comparative designs to investigate the rhetoric of populists (e.g., Ernst, Engesser, Büchel, Blassnig, & Esser, 2017 ;Zulianello et al, 2018 ), media coverage of populism (e.g., Wettstein et al, 2018a), citizen engagement with populist communication (e.g., Bobba, Cremonesi, Mancosu, & Seddone, 2018 ), and eff ects of populist communication (e.g., Müller et al, 2017 ;Hameleers et al, 2018 ). Ideally, such comparisons take into account the multi-level structure of factors infl uencing the senders, mediators, and receivers of populist communication by including, for example, contextual information regarding country characteristics such as unemployment rates or migration fi gures into their analysis (e.g., Hameleers et al, 2018 ), but this also poses considerable conceptual and methodological challenges.…”