“What is your issue?!” The role of emotional appeals, issue ownership and populism in political communication on social media

Populist parties are considered to make use of more emotions in their political communication than nonpopulist parties. Likewise, emotions have been suggested to at least partly drive the vote for populist parties, amongst a set of key cognitive and attitudinal factors (Rico, Guinjoan, and Anduiza 2017; Salmela and von Scheve 2017). Prior research has indeed verified that populist parties are significantly more likely to make use of negative emotional appeals and less positive emotional appeals than mainstream parties (Nai 2021; Widmann 2021). In this study, the goal is to further explore the role of issue ownership in relationship to emotional appeals. Issue ownership theory (Petrocik 1996) suggests that political parties ‘own’ specific policy issues, making it crucial for these parties to mobilize on these issues and boost the salience of these issues. Exposure of issues in both traditional and social media facilitates attempts to claim issue ownership and affect voter perceptions of issue ownership (Stubager and Seeberg 2016; Walgrave, Lefevere, and Nuytemans 2009). Combining theory on the role of emotions in political communication, populism and issue ownership, we assess patterns in the dynamics of political social media posts from both the supply (parties) and demand-side (voters) perspective. Regarding the supply-side, all parties are expected to mostly promote their owned issues in their social media posts. Populist parties are more likely to make emotional appeals than mainstream parties, in particular negative ones. Still, issue ownership is anticipated to matter, with emotional appeals being most prevalent while discussing issues that political parties own. Regarding the demand-side, we expect citizens to respond more emotionally and strongly to issues of populist parties in general, and to owned issues of a specific party compared to issues that a party does not own. We test these hypotheses in Belgium via relying on an extensive dataset covering 9 months of Facebook and Twitter posts (including measurements of engagements with these posts) for populist and nonpopulist parties and party presidents (n = 12,438 ) in 2021. We combine computational and manual content analysis to assess the sentiment (via a dictionary-based method) of the posts and identify political issues, while collecting engagements with the posts (likes, shares or retweets, comments, specific reactions on Facebook). Preliminary findings suggest that posts by left- and right-wing populist actors significantly contain more emotional appeals —negative ones in particular— than posts by mainstream party actors. However, we find this to be mostly driven by the issues that are being highlighted. Especially posts on owned issues by populist parties (e.g., immigration, but also economic issues) contain many, mostly negative, emotional appeals. Moreover, citizens are more likely to react emotional (i.e., angry) to populist parties’ communication than to nonpopulist party posts, which holds for left- and right-wing populist parties. Again, issue ownership plays a role, as citizens do also tend to respond more emotionally to posts on owned issues of mainstream parties.