Is Political Discourse on Facebook dominated by Populist Parties? Comparative Insights from Europe

The last decade was the “decade of populism,” with the late breakthrough of right-wing populism in Germany and Spain and populists coming to power in Hungary, Poland, and Italy. Scholars stress that the role of the media and a changing media landscape are crucial factors for the increasing success of populist parties, with many linking it explicitly to the growing importance of political social media communication. Social media seems well suited for a populist communication style, characterized by emotionalization, negative affects, taboo-breaking, and simplification, which are well-suited for the emerging social media logic. Facebook, in particular, has been speculated to facilitate the spread of populism, as the platform is accused of being too careless when it comes to regulating its content. However, although much research has been conducted in the area of single-country studies, which have analyzed to what extent populism has played a role in various social media campaigns, comparative studies are scarce. One problem is, especially when it comes to Facebook data, the increasingly limited data access, although analyzing Facebook is highly relevant, given that the platform is among the most used social media platforms across the globe. A first glance at the most liked Facebook fanpages of political parties in Europe shows that eight out of ten belong to populist parties. Is this just the tip of the iceberg, or are those eight parties just suggesting a correlation that does not hold up against further scrutiny? The article investigates the social media performance of populist compared to non-populist parties in Europe. While the Facebook API only allows access to incomplete and biased samples, the comparatively novel initiative Crowdtangle makes (unbiased) full samples available for researchers. The obtained party-level Facebook data can then be linked to party-level datasets such as CHES and specific party-level populism datasets such as the PopuList and POPPA. Fine-grained measures of populism and its subdimensions allow identifying the driving factors behind Facebook performance, including attached ideologies and other related aspects. The research will be guided by two main research questions: 1) Is the political discourse on Facebook dominated by populist parties? 2) Does content by populist parties generate more and different user attention? The analysis will cover aggregated page-level activities for 2020, including post frequency, page likes, shares, reactions, and comments. Post-level data will be used to analyze to what extent populists receive more (in terms of frequency) and different (in terms of reactions) attention.