The Populist Gaze: Personalized Politics in Multimodal Media

Populism is considered as a variation of a “thin” ideology in which the “pure people” stand opposite to the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004, p. 543). In line with this conflict frame, populists often label news media as part of that corrupt establishment, accusing media of being biased in their disdain (Soontjens et al., 2021). It is therefore not surprising that populists prefer social media to engage with audiences, as these platforms facilitate direct communication without gatekeeping (Larsson, 2022; Varis, 2020). Indeed, populists were found to communicate in more conventionally populist manner on social media compared to appearances in talkshows (Ernst et al., 2019), suggesting that they speak more freely when in control over their message. Whereas the goal of news reports is informative, politician’s communication on social media is strategic and campaign-oriented. With more citizens consuming news through social media (Newman et al., 2025), where politicians’ self-portrayals appear alongside their mediated portrayals within a user’s feed, the boundary between these two types of portrayals grows blurry. For populist actors, the divergence between self-portrayals and media portrayals may reinforce their anti-elite and anti-media narratives, whereas convergence raises questions about a news outlet’s independence. As populist parties continue to gain electoral strength worldwide (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017; Rooduijn et al., 2023), examining the (mis)alignment between a politician’s self-portrayal versus mediated news portrayal is increasingly important - particularly because populist voters prefer antiestablishment and attitudinal congruent media content (Hameleers et al., 2017). Research to the visual (mis)alignment of politician’s self-portrayals versus news outlet’s mediated portrayals shows that the former typically features more smiling, whereas the latter shows more diversity (Haim and Jungblut, 2021). Although this is a relevant finding that confirms potential misalignment, it says little about the communicative intent of the corresponding multimodal frame, i.e., the combined meaning of text and image. However, political communication is multimodal (Geise and Xu, 2025), and the textual and visual modality both shape a voter’s perception of politicians, albeit differently (Boomgaarden et al., 2016; Geise and Baden, 2014; Schill, 2012). It is therefore important to deepen our knowledge about this possible (mis)alignment of politicians’ self-portrayals versus their mediated portrayals in news reports in order to understand what shapes the public’s perception of politicians. This study asks the following research question: To what extent do multimodal self-portrayals by politicians on their social media differ from the portrayals about them in news reports, and to what extent is this (mis)alignment different for populist politicians versus mainstream politicians?After a critical analysis of the literature on multimodal personalized political communication, a case study to Dutch party leaders and their communication on Instagram demonstrates this. The time period ranges from September 2023 to December 2025, which includes two campaigns and one routine period. 6,174 Instagram posts (N=12,610 images) from politicians’ personal Instagram accounts are collected, of which only self-portrayals are featured. In parallel, news articles from the same time period are collected from four different media outlets. The analysis is done through multimodal clustering, and presented in a visual juxtaposition.