Anger and Pride on the People’s Platform: Populists’ Communication on Facebook

Social media has been argued to reinforce the populist message. At the same time, populist politicians are less keen on using these platforms. This paper explored this puzzling finding in three countries (Netherlands, Sweden, and Austria), and it extended the scope of analysis to Facebook as previous research mainly has focused on Twitter. We investigate the Facebook behavior of all 682 Austrian, Dutch and Swedish MPs. All these three countries have prominent populist parties and similar electoral systems. We gathered data from politicians Facebook pages over the course of three months, covering every post and the comments to these post as well as emotional reactions. This unique dataset allows us to gain a deeper understanding as to how populist actors use Facebook. Populist party leaders, indeed, seem to make use of Facebook for reaching out to their community, whereas few of these parties elected parliamentarians uses Facebook. On Facebook, these leaders might benefit from politicizing their electorate’s feelings of indignation. Based on the results presented in this paper, it is specifically feelings of outrage that differentiate populist actors' emotional engagement. On their Facebook pages, the most striking feature is that posts trigger angry responses above all.