Populist Leadership 2.0: A Mixed Methods Approach to Theo Francken’s Discourse and His Relationship with Followers in the Era of Social Media

Today, the electorate of many democracies are confronted with populist leaders whose communication suggests a break away from traditional political communication. Previously, scholars have already looked, on the one hand, into the characteristics of populist discourses on the supply side, and on the other hand, to the nature as well as the causes of populist attitudes or demands among voters. However, many students of populism have argued that populist leadership constitutes a peculiar kind of political leadership, leading to an ongoing debate as to whether if, why and when, populist leaders could be described as charismatic. The biggest limitation of previous research has been that it overlooked that rather than a characteristic of the leader himself, charisma, as originally conceived by Weber, resides in ‘the eye of the beholder’. To study if the bond populist leaders have with supporters is charismatic, leader-follower relationships need to be regarded as continuously, iteratively, interpretatively, and discursively constructed or performed relationships. Hence, we argue that the widespread use of social media by both populist leaders and supporters gives rise to interactions that offer a yet unexplored empirical opportunity to study populist leaders’ discourse, its reception by followers, and hence the leader-follower relationships that arise both simultaneously and as they naturally occur. To this end, we collected all the data from Theo Francken’s self-managed facebook account from his start as Belgium’s secretary of state for migration. Francken and his party, the New-Flemish Alliance, came to government after persuading many former far-right voters resulted in a landslide electoral victory. Their provocative and polemic style dominates Belgian media’s coverage of politics, and notwithstanding critics’ condemnation of Francken’s supposed antagonistic right-wing populism, since in power, his popularity in polls is skyrocketing. Regarding methods, analyses took place in a mixed method design. First, all posts and reactions were used in a quantitative text analysis, this revealed: a) the main patterns in Francken’s communication; b) the patterns in the reactions (comments, likes, shares) they generate, and c) the degree of populism in his discourse by way of a content analysis based on prior studies. Second, in order to distinguish between exceptional, agenda dependent, and normal day-to-day leader-follower interactions, we divided the data in low, medium and high impact posts. Subsequently, on this base a theoretical sample was collected in each category and used for in-depth interpretative computer assisted qualitative analysis in order to analyse: a) when and why different kinds of leader-follower interactions give rise to relationships that can or can not be considered as charismatic; and, b) whether our measurement of populist elements in discourse based on the quantitative literature can be inductively expanded and improved. Our main findings shed new lights on the multifaceted and various ways in which populist leader’s discourse and its reception by supporters generates bonds which because of the followers expressions of unconditional support and faith in the leader’s extra-ordinariness and mission, indicate that in certain cases and to a varying degree populist leaders successfully establish a charismatic following among voters.