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Bipolar Populism? The Use of Anti‐Elitism and People‐Centrism by Swiss Parties on Social Media

2017; Wiley; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/spsr.12264

1662-6370

Nicole Ernst, Sven Engesser, Frank Esser,

Social Media and Politics

Social media have changed politics. The days of politicians being almost entirely dependent on professional journalists to distribute their messages to the wider public are over. In hybrid media systems, where new and old media are increasingly intertwined and complement each other (Chadwick 2013; Kübler and Kriesi 2017), politicians can choose from a variety of communication channels to achieve their goals. Twitter and Facebook, in particular, provide political actors with unfiltered access to the public and allow politicians to communicate directly with their voters (Esser et al. 2017; Golbeck et al. 2010; Jacobs and Spierings 2016). These opportunities allow populist politicians such as Beppe Grillo or Geert Wilders to spread their messages to their voters without any journalistic intervention. In sum, social media are particularly well-suited as channels of populist communication (Ernst et al. 2017a): They provide direct access to the public without external interference; they offer the possibility of establishing a close and direct connection to the people; they foster the potential for targeted, personalized forms of communication; and they can create a feeling of community, belonging and recognition among otherwise scattered groups (see also Engesser et al. 2017b). Against this backdrop, it is obvious that the National Center of Competence in Research on 'Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century' (NCCR Democracy) decided to examine the relation between populism and social media in more detail. The introductory text to this debate section (by Kübler and Kriesi 2017) has already established the wider context and explained the relationship between mediatization, globalization and the populist response. Of particular interest for this article are the new opportunities provided by new media to political actors. In a previous publication, we have demonstrated – by way of qualitative analysis – how populist actors craft their messages when spreading aspects of their ideology via the media (see Engesser et al. 2017a). In another six-country quantitative analysis, we established that, compared with centrist parties, extreme and opposition parties are more populist on social media and that they use Facebook more often than Twitter for populist communication, at least outside of election campaign periods (Ernst et al. 2017a). The present article expands on these earlier NCCR publications and seeks to demonstrate that parties at both fringes of the political spectrum are more inclined than mainstream political parties to use populist communication on social media. The specific affinity of extreme parties for populist communication has already been documented by other scholars who analyzed party manifestos (Rooduijn and Akkerman 2017; Steenbergen and Weber 2015), press releases (Bernhard 2016) and interviews with parliamentarians (Landerer 2014). We advance the existing literature by extending the validity of this pattern to social media. We focus our analysis on two dimensions of populism – people-centrism and anti-elitism – and explore how often these dimensions are addressed by left-wing and right-wing parties in their respective online communication repertoires. We will utilize a dataset that includes information on a wide range of parties from five Western democracies, and, after a brief comparative overview, will focus on the exemplary case of Switzerland. We will investigate, in-depth, how five major Swiss parties use populist communication and whether they prefer people-centrism or anti-elitism in their messages on Facebook and Twitter. Populism is defined as a thin ideology (Aalberg et al. 2017; Abts and Rummens 2007; Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008; Mudde 2004; see Kübler and Kriesi 2017) that considers society to be separated in two homogenous and antagonistic groups, the "the good people" versus "the bad elite," and postulates the unrestricted sovereignty of the people (Wirth et al. 2016). Due to its ideological thinness, populism can be enriched with thicker ideologies (Kriesi 2014; Mudde 2004) such as nativism, authoritarianism, liberalism, or socialism. Therefore, populism is not an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. Rather, European examples, such as the Greek party Syriza (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014) or the Spanish movement Podemos (Casero-Ripolles et al. 2016), illustrate that left-wing political actors use populism in their communication, too. Once conceptualized as a thin ideology, populism can be regarded as consisting of three core dimensions: people-centrism, anti-elitism, and demands for restoring national sovereignty (Wirth et al. 2016). These ideological components are further broken down into "key messages" (see Table 1) when populist actors communicate them to the public via the media. We conducted a statement-level quantitative content analysis of the Tweets and Facebook posts of 77 politicians from five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and United Kingdom) during a three-month period in 20151 . For each country, we investigated the five largest parties in parliament across the left-right spectrum. In Switzerland, for instance, this included – from left to right – the Green Party (GPS), the Social Democrats (SP), the Christian Democrats (CVP), the Liberals (FDP) and the Swiss People's Party (SVP). In the 2015 general election, these five parties received an aggregated total of 83 percent of the Swiss vote share (Bundesamt für Statistik 2015). Across all countries, we selected politicians for inclusion in our study according to two criteria: they held a high position within government or their party (e.g., head of government or party leader) or had high resonance on social media (followers on Twitter) as of January 2015. For the final analysis, we considered only those Tweets and Facebook posts by politicians that explicitly addressed an issue or a social actor. This yielded 1'220 social media statements, of which 217 were made by Swiss politicians. The units of analysis are single social media statements made by a 'speaker' about an 'issue' or about a 'target actor'. Statements could contain one or several populist messages by one speaker. A team of multi-lingual student coders were trained extensively until their intercoder agreement scores reached acceptable levels of reliability (Brennan and Prediger's κ = .83). Behind the three dimensions of people-centrism, anti-elitism and demands for restoring sovereignty, we identified nine concrete populist "key messages" (Table 1). Theoretically speaking, these key messages denote sentence-level speech acts by politicians or other communicators, and these statements are the communicative building blocks of larger ideological dimensions. The nine key populist messages that we derived from the relevant research literature (see Wirth et al. 2016) are listed in Table 1. To measure the occurrence of these key messages, we developed a codebook with several categories for each key message. When at least one of the nine key messages was evident in a social media post, we treated this occurrence as a manifestation of 'populist communication'. To locate European parties and their politicians on the left-right scale, we relied on the classification system of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) (Bakker et al. 2014). For a more thorough description of the methodological procedures, we refer the reader to our previous study, published as Ernst et al. (2017a). To explore whether parties from either end of the political spectrum are more prone to using populist communication, we conducted linear and quadratic OLS regressions. We used the amount of populist communication on social media as the dependent variable and the CHES score for parties as the independent variable. Across all 25 investigated parties from five countries, we found that every tenth Facebook or Twitter statement (11%) contained at least one populist key message. Whereas the first two dimensions are used with almost equal frequency – six percent of social media statements are anti-elitist and five percent are people-centrist – the third dimension and the associated demands for more national sovereignty remain largely unused (below 1%) during the study period. More importantly, our findings show a clear U-curve pattern, illustrating that extreme parties use more populist key messages than center parties across the five countries. The respective quadratic regression explains 30% of variance (p < .05). In this way, we support previous empirical evidence that both left- and right-wing politicians use populism in their communication (Cranmer 2011; Jagers and Walgrave 2007) – but we can extend this finding to five countries and to social media. Separate quadratic regression analyses for each country reveal that the U-curve pattern is consistent for Germany (R2 = .66), Great Britain (R2 = .70) and Switzerland (R2 = .93).2 In fact, Switzerland represents an "exemplary case" in this regard, with 93 percent of Swiss parties' political communication styles explained by this U-curved pattern (see Figure 1). Because Switzerland illustrates the essential features of "bipolar populism" so well, we will analyze this case in the remainder of this article more thoroughly (on the value of exemplary case study analysis, see Yin 2003).3 In Switzerland, five percent of all social media messages contain at least one populist key message. If we look at the individual parties, we see in Figure 1 that the SVP (11%), GPS (6%) and FDP (6%) particularly use populism in their Twitter and Facebook communication, whereas the CVP (3%) and SP (2%) are more reluctant to use populist communication. It is thus not only the usual suspect SVP that resorts to populist key messages (Ernst et al. 2017a) but also the Green Party (March 2007). However, we have reasonable grounds on which to believe that behind this apparent resemblance, there are notable differences in the use of populist online communication by right- and left-wing parties. To gain a better understanding of this difference, we divide the broad concept of populist communication (Figure 1) into its main sub-dimensions: people-centrism (Figure 2) and anti-elitism (Figure 3). The third dimension, demands to restore sovereignty, is not considered further in this analysis because of its rare occurrence. Starting with people-centrism, it becomes immediately clear from Figure 2 that this dimension is mostly used by the left-wing Greens and Social Democrats, while it remains largely ignored by the centrist and right-wing parties. The linear regression expressing the relationship between people-centrism and left-wing party orientation explains 72 percent (p = .68) of the social media communication of Swiss politicians. Particularly, the GPS uses messages on social media that advocate for the people. These messages stress the people's virtues and achievements and are designed to express closeness between Green politics and the people. In summary, our results support earlier findings by Jagers and Walgrave (2007) that Green and Social Democratic parties also behave in a partially populist manner – not by excluding outsiders but by championing the causes of 'the people'. Moving to the individual analysis of anti-elitism (Figure 3), we find another very clear relationship: The farther right a party is located on the political spectrum, the more it uses anti-elitist messages in its social media communication. The linear regression explains 77% of variance (p < .05). Particularly, SVP and FDP circulate conflictual messages against the elites; these messages tend to discredit elites, blame them for alleged failures and present elites as detached from the 'the people'. Again, we can corroborate the finding of Jagers and Walgrave (2007) that right-wing parties tend to rely on exclusivist communication that is negative toward elites. The brief analysis presented here supports previous findings that parties at both ends of the political spectrum have a greater affinity for populist communication than moderate mainstream parties do. Furthermore, by investigating the exemplary case of Switzerland in more detail, we can confirm that it is not only the SVP that uses populist key messages (e.g. Cranmer 2011; Engesser et al. 2017a) but that the GPS and FDP rely on populist communication too. By analyzing the two major dimensions of populism separately, we also demonstrated that left-wing parties tend to emphasize people-centrist messages, whereas right-wing parties tend to use anti-elitist messages more. It is noteworthy that the two dimensions invite different styles of political communication: whereas the first is more advocative ('pro' people), the second is more conflictive in nature ('against' elites). The Green Party of Switzerland focuses mainly on the advocative people-centrism dimension by claiming closeness to Swiss voters or portraying them as unified in their preferences. A cynic could argue that the GPS does not realize its full populist potential because, as an opposition party, the Greens could attack and discredit the ruling political or financial elite even more. This brings us to the right-end of the scale, where the Swiss SVP represents an exception to the widely held assumption that populist parties may be successful when opposing other parties but lose their unique strength once entering the government (Heinisch 2003). Although the SVP has been part of the government for decades and has been winning the largest voter shares in general elections since 2003 (Ernst et al. 2017b), the party remains extremely critical of political, legal, cultural, and media elites. By being part of the government and simultaneously acting as government's biggest critic, the SVP fulfills a dual role. Its former leader Christoph Blocher, in particular, mastered this double role by successfully promoting himself as challenger of the allegedly corrupt and incapable government, while, simultaneously, being part of the very same government. During the period under investigation, politicians of the Social Democrats used the fewest populist messages on social media and only emphasized the people-centrism dimension. This low share may be explained by a division of labor with the party's independent youth organization, "Young Socialists of Switzerland (JUSO)". JUSO's online communication typically features multiple populist characteristics, including people-elite antagonism (Luginbühl 2014). Due to the populist communication tendencies of the JUSO, the SP may have strategically decided to adopt a more moderate and non-populist tone on social media – in an effort to target different segments of the electorate with these two complementary approaches. Our recommendation for future research is to include more extreme parties in studies of various countries. Recall that we did not find clear support for the U-curved pattern in France and Italy, but we believe that more updated and extended party samples would produce the effect of "bipolar populism" in these two countries as well. For Switzerland, it would be interesting to incorporate the communication behavior of far-left parties such as the Alternative List (AL) or Swiss Party of Labor (PdA), as well as far-right parties such as the Ticino League (LdT) or the Geneva Citizens' Movement (MCG) to further support the validity of the U-curve pattern. Nicole Ernst is a doctoral student in the Department of International & Comparative Media Research at the University of Zurich. In research and teaching, she focuses on political communication in social media. Address for Correspondence: IPMZ – Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, CH-8050 Zürich, Switzerland. Phone: +41 (0)44 635 205; Email: n.ernst@ipmz.uzh.ch Sven Engesser is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of International & Comparative Media Research at the University of Zurich. In research and teaching, he focuses on political journalism and media systems. Frank Esser is full professor and head of the Department of International & Comparative Media Research at the University of Zurich. In research and teaching, he focuses on comparative media research and mediatization in political communication.