Pandemic populism? How COVID-19 triggered populist user comments on mass media Facebook sites in Germany and Austria

COVID-19 and the measures taken to contain the pandemic have triggered protests in several European countries. In Germany and Austria, this protest became particularly visible as large-scale demonstrations. Scholars have pointed out the ideological closeness of these protests to populism: Both attack elites, such as politicians, experts, or the media for deceiving and subjugating ‘the people’. This study focuses on populist protest expressed in the digital public sphere, that massively gained importance during the lockdowns. This paper analyses, how COVID-19 related posts on Facebook sites of popular German and Austrian mass media triggered populist user comments throughout 2020. Commenting on social media sites provides users with an opportunity to engage in ‘participatory populism’. Unlike populist messages of political actors or the media, user generated populism has received far too little academic attention. We expect that posts dealing with COVID-19 receive more populist user comments than posts on other topics, especially if they discuss restrictive measures or mention public health experts. Furthermore, we expect that country-specific factors, such as the in- or exclusion of populist parties in the party system, and time-specific factors, such as the number of infections and adopted measures, moderate the studied relation. We test our hypotheses on a sample of N = 6.037 posts from 9 highly popular Facebook sites of German and Austrian mass media, posted between Feb – Dec 2020. We selected sites from public television news broadcasts, tabloid, and quality press, to control for media-type effects. Per post, we downloaded up to 200 comments. To measure the dependent variable, the number of populist comments, and central explanatory variables, we perform and validate a computer-assisted content analysis, employing a dictionary approach. For hypotheses testing, we use a hierarchical negative binominal regression model that accounts for the nested structure of our data and the dependent count variable. Our findings help to understand the emergence of user-generated populism that not only undermines the efforts to stop the pandemic but has the potential to delegitimize democratic institutions.