Populism as a Communication Style: Toward a Normalization in Political Communication

The financial crisis, the refugee emergency, and the terrorism have aggravated the political crisis in Europe, contributing to increase citizens’ feelings of distrust concerning the politics. Indeed, political parties and their leaders are attempting to fill the gap between them and citizens setting up new communication styles and strategies. The adoption of a populist communication style appears to be the key to get closer to the people, often riding anti-political feelings. In fact, many scholars are highlighting the diffusion of a kind of “mainstream populism” (Mair, 2002; Caiani & Graziano, 2016) which seems to involve even the main European parties. In this scenario, populism becomes a style (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007; Moffitt & Tormey, 2014), a language, a discourse that fits with media needs and with mediatisation processes (Mazzoleni 2014). In a context shaped by personalization and disintermediation processes, the representation of the political forces and their strategies are deeply connected to the leaders’ figure and their communicative practices. Political parties’ leaders often stage these practices in social media environments that offer them the chance to manage personally their own representation, through the so-called news management practices. Indeed, leaders are more free to vary and change their communication style depending on the context or the issue. According to these consideration, the aim of the study will be to find out the relationships - if they exist – between specific issues (i.e. campaign; terrorism; etc.) and the adoption of a populist style by the main Italian leaders’ communication in social media. The study is based on a multidimensional reconstruction of the populist style concept, deduced from the recent literature. Hypothesis The hypothesis that will guide the entire work are: 1) all leaders (even non-populists) adopt a populist communication style depending on issues; and 2) the adoption of a populist style foster the spread and the liking of leaders’ tweets. Research Questions According to these hypothesis, the study will try to answer to the following research questions: RQ1: Does Italian leaders adopt a populist communication style depending on the issues? RQ2: Does the adoption of a populist communication style increase the number of retweets and favourites gained by political leaders’ tweets? Methodology Among social media, Twitter plays a central role in the hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013) considering that conversations which occur on this platform often echoes in offline public discourse (Bentivegna 2015). So, we have chosen to download and analyse one year of the main Italian leaders’ timelines (Matteo Renzi, Beppe Grillo, Giorgia Meloni, and Matteo Salvini). The contents of the timelines will be analysed and codified to identify: 1) each leaders’ specific communicative style, and 2) the presence of populist elements in their tweets. Then, specific periods from the twitter timeline will be selected (i.e. electoral campaign, terrorism, etc.). Finally, leaders’ communication styles will be compared in order to: 1) highlight if the adoption of a particular style is related with the issues; and 2) verify how the adoption of a populist style affect users’ engagements in Twitter