Populist Communication About Democracy: How Populist Parties Interpret Democracy Over Time and space

Advanced democracies are facing multiple crises, including conflicts, migration, and economic downturns, which are triggering an increase in political polarization that, in turn, fosters support for populist parties. Some well-known examples of populist parties, which were not considered reliable partners in government just two decades ago, are now influential ruling actors around the world. Most of these parties are associated with the right end of the ideological spectrum. What is paradoxical enough is that populism, per se, cannot exist outside of the realm of representative democracy, and populist leaders seem to be well-aware of this mechanism. For such actors the maintenance of some sort of democracy is vital as much as it is vital for them to constantly redefine their conception of “the people” and “the elite”, widely regarded as the two core elements of populism. If democracy is vital for populist parties, we should expect them to refer to such concept in their “everyday communication”, an issue, this latter, that is still widely under investigated within the literature. Which democracy are populist parties preaching for? How do they depict democracy in their political communication? Does their definition of democracy change over time and as a function of contextual events and situations (i.e. populists in government)? Can we identify common patterns pointing to a similar (aka transnational) conception of democracy? How does their communication around the concept of democracy impact upon the wide public? This work proposes a cross-country (France, Germany, Italy, and the UK) comparative analysis of how populist parties and leaders talk about democracy over a period of approximately 10 years of Twitter communication (2013 -2022). Although Twitter does not offer an overall view of populist communication around the concept of democracy, social media channels are widely regarded as one of the preferred communication tools used by populist parties, allowing for a disintermediated relationship between leaders and followers. Using a mixed-method approach, this study begins with a review of the controversial concept of democracy. Indeed, according to many scholars, the populist view of democracy is intrinsically a) anti-pluralist including only the “authentic people” counterposed to the “illegitimate intruders” (political parties, independent media etc.) b) anti-parliamentarian as there can be no such thing as a legitimate opposition c) anti-constitutional as there is no need for a higher law that mediates between and integrates different social forces competing for political power. Based on such review this work elaborates a dictionary to filter a multilingual corpus of approximately 600k tweets collected over a 10 years period. The resulting text will reveal how populist parties talk about democracy over time and space. This is done adopting a mixed method approach including both quantitative (e.g.: distribution over time, analysis of keywords) and qualitative techniques (e.g.: keywords in context and inductive analysis of the obtained text). In the last step of the analysis, the work investigates the degree of engagement triggered by populist parties’ discourse about democracy pointing toward the effects of their communication flow.