Populist Strategies in Networked Communication. Poland, Romania and Slovakia Compared

Social networks have been playing an increasing role as sources of information and news for people all over Europe. In Central and Eastern European countries like Slovakia, Poland or Romania, Facebook is the main social media platform that people use, with constantly growing numbers of user accounts over the past years. Previous studies have pointed towards the influence of social media in shaping political opinions and even potentially influencing elections. Moreover, scholars has emphasized the significance of social media for the populists politics. They not only allow for bypassing the traditional media and gatekeepers, provide additional channel of information and mobilization for voters but also fit very well fragmented and thin nature of the populist messages. But there is still little research on both: a) what “populists” look like in different national contexts especially from the understudied Central & Eastern Europe, and to what extent they fit the traditional conceptualizations or bring in new elements; and b) how they interact, discursively, with their potential electorate via social media and how they manage to engage these publics. In order to address these issues , the paper adopts the communication-driven approach to populism to analyze quantitatively and qualitatively the controlled communication that six different political actors from Poland, Romania and Slovakia published on their Facebook profiles during a sample period of 14 days preceding election day in 2019 EP elections.