Measuring media populism through a comparative expert survey: a first assessment

The efforts of scholars to define and measure the populist phenomenon have significantly increased in the last decades. On the one hand, studies have mainly focused on the supply side of populism (e.g., political parties and leaders positioning) and on the demand side of populism (e.g., voters’ opinions). On the other hand, literature has also investigated media populism focusing on how and how much populist parties’ stances are spread through the media. Few studies, so far, have empirically addressed the dissemination of populist stances directly by the media. Assessing how much media outlets actively - and purposely - boost their populist views (independently of populist actors and parties) is a challenging task to be achieved. Media populism could be explicit, clear, and therefore easy to identify. Nevertheless, in most cases, it is not limited only to contents and styles, whereas it results from a broad set of different aspects. Media populism is often composite and thin. It may be continuous or occasional, limited to specific campaigns with political targets, resulting from the riding or promotion of waves of public indignation or widespread fears. Also, media populism is often derived from actions undertaken by individual journalists, news media editors, and pundits that contribute to defining the editorial line. All these features made it a concept particularly hard to be assessed. When the inquiry object is complex and can not be observed directly, the expert survey results as a very effective method. Expert surveys are indeed suitable for measuring complex concepts that require expert knowledge and evaluative judgments, especially when alternative data and sources of information are rare or not available. Besides, expert surveys are keen on a comparative design since they allow using the same format in different countries; furthermore, they are relatively inexpensive to administer. The Media Populism (M-POP) Expert Survey measures the proximity of the most relevant media outlets in a given country with the key elements of populism – people-centrism, anti-elitism, and exclusionism. Experts from more than 50 selected countries covering Africa, America, Europe, East Asia and Oceania. For each media outlet, experts will be required to provide an assessment of the relevant dimensions underlying populism. This allows a better understanding of media populism in terms of its intensity (how much a given media outlet is populist?) and its peculiar nature (is a given media outlet completely populist, anti-elitist, exclusionist, or not-populist at all?). This expert survey aims at filling the gap of knowledge about news media and their role in spreading populist stances by providing a large comparative dataset valuable for media studies, election studies, and voters behaviour scholars.