The Demand Side of Populism and the Web: Investigating How Do Populists' Supporters Engage Online

This paper aims to understand the demand-side of populism, namely populist’ supporters and their political activity online. Populism has recently gained momentum across the globe with populist’ parties having a significant or greater presence in political systems than ever before. Although the connection between the Internet and populism was identified quite early (see Bimber, 1998), only recently researchers have started to be interested in populism and its relationship to the Internet. Nonetheless, substantial attention is paid to the supply side of populism (politicians or political parties). People who support populist leaders, politicians or parties take advantage of the Internet tools where they can connect with like-minded people and be able to express themselves openly (e.g. see Bartlett et al., 2011). In order to investigate the demand side of populism and their online political activity, I rethink a typology of political participation offered by Ekman & Amnå (2012), making a distinction between social involvement (being attentive to politics), political participation (actions towards influencing the political outcomes), and civic engagement (working towards community). I suggest that these three categories can be seen as different lenses of viewing political activity online. To explore populist` supporters political engagement online, the perspective of social involvement is used. Social involvement in this paper is analysed by looking at the online expression of populist’ supporters and their mode of democratic communication. The main objective of this paper is to find out what is the most dominant mode of democratic communication of populists' supporters on Facebook Pages. In order to do so, posts and comments are extracted from two Facebook Pages that were created for people supporting Kukiz`15. Kukiz`15 is a Polish civic movement, known from its populist rhetoric. Adopting a method of qualitative content analysis, the paper will consider how technological design influences the online political engagement of populist supporters. Further, it will examine the contribution of users to the dominant mode of democratic communication. This research aims to contribute to the current knowledge on political engagement by drawing the attention to the communicative practices expressed online by populist supporters that might be a precursor of direct actions aimed at influencing the government. It tries also to move the attention of scholars interested in political communication from a supply side of populism to a demand side of populism.