“You (Thus Me), the People.” A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Platform Analysis of “the Leader” and “the People” in Social Media Campaign Photography

Populism and social media share an elective affinity. The affordances of social media platforms encourage the performance of a populist political style and accelerate the circulation of populist tropes. However, while several studies have demonstrated how social media enable the performance of a populist political style, little is known about the extent to which they enable or constrain the circulation of populist ideological content. We address this gap through the conceptual lens of value affordances—the principles emerging from interactions between stakeholders and technology. As values are commonly described as the building blocks of ideology, focusing on value affordances unlocks the possibility to investigate the interactions between populism’s “thin” ideology, the “thick” ideologies accompanying it, and the norms regulating expression in digital sphere. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach through a case study from Italy, focusing on how party leaders Matteo Salvini and Carlo Calenda stake their “claim to ordinariness” by posting photos of their time off with their children (a practice known as sharenting). In this sense, our case study “controls” for style to focus on populism as content. Our analysis of the values expressed in 100 sharenting posts circulated by the two politicians on Instagram revealed what follows. Salvini and Calenda converge towards the expression of values typically associated with sharenting: happiness, togetherness, care, and authenticity. However, the two leaders diverge in the invocation of values reflecting their respective brands of populism. Salvini’s sharenting images display mundane weekend or holiday activities in the company of his daughter. They commonly feature cues for the values of simplicity and conformity, which we relate to his “everyday” brand of celebrity politics and his right-wing political affiliation. In the captions, Salvini frequently addresses the audience directly with good day wishes and wishes for religious holidays, thus expressing the values of affiliation and civility, as well as faith. In contrast, Calenda’s images normally depict visits to places of “high culture” (e.g., museums, archaeological sites) in the company his large nuclear family. They disproportionately feature cues for the value of wealth, which we relate to his brand of “managerial” populism modelled after business executives. The associated captions often adopt a solemn register, praising the distinctiveness of Italian cultural heritage as they try to persuade his followers to visit specific sites. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the values associated with sharenting exert a homogenizing effect that constrains the self-presentation of populist politicians. This notwithstanding, we also found that politicians use sharenting as an opportunity to promote their respective understandings of “the people.” While Salvini promotes a low brow form of nationalism based on religious holidays and participation in mundane rituals such as Christmas fairs, Calenda adopts an equally nationalist narrative that presents high brow art as cultural heritage that all Italians should know and celebrate. We conclude that the value affordances of vernacular social media genres like sharenting both enable and constrain populist content, imposing value-inflected frameworks within which politicians enjoy some room for maneuver to express their own ideology.