TY - JOUR
T1 - The Populist Political Communication Style in Action
T2 - Podemos’s Issues and Functions on Twitter During the 2016 Spanish General Election
AU - Casero-Ripollés, Andreu
AU - Sintes-Olivella, Marçal
AU - Franch, Pere
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is part of the research projects CSO2014-52283-C2-1-P and CSO2014-52283-C2-2-P, funded by the Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness of the Government of Spain (State Plan of Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2013-2016).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, © 2017 SAGE Publications.
PY - 2017/8/1
Y1 - 2017/8/1
N2 - Populism is a phenomenon that has been acquiring great relevance over recent years in the United States and Europe. Literature on the subject has identified the existence of a populist style that also affects political communication. The aim of this article is to analyze the structure of issues and the functions of messages circulated by a populist party in order to determine the presence and incidence of this style’s main components. The methodology is based on a quantitative analysis of the content of the Twitter profiles of the Spanish political party Podemos and its leader, Pablo Iglesias, during the 2016 Spanish elections. Totally, 2,612 tweets were analyzed. The results allow the identification of a strategy of complementarity, which appears as a new component in the communication style of populism in the digital environment. Podemos is also seen to lean toward antielitism and its leader toward the communicative construction of “the people”.
AB - Populism is a phenomenon that has been acquiring great relevance over recent years in the United States and Europe. Literature on the subject has identified the existence of a populist style that also affects political communication. The aim of this article is to analyze the structure of issues and the functions of messages circulated by a populist party in order to determine the presence and incidence of this style’s main components. The methodology is based on a quantitative analysis of the content of the Twitter profiles of the Spanish political party Podemos and its leader, Pablo Iglesias, during the 2016 Spanish elections. Totally, 2,612 tweets were analyzed. The results allow the identification of a strategy of complementarity, which appears as a new component in the communication style of populism in the digital environment. Podemos is also seen to lean toward antielitism and its leader toward the communicative construction of “the people”.
KW - Podemos
KW - Twitter
KW - political communication
KW - populism
KW - social media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85031936642&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=pure_univeritat_ramon_llull&SrcAuth=WosAPI&KeyUT=WOS:000413493300003&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=WOS
U2 - 10.1177/0002764217707624
DO - 10.1177/0002764217707624
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85031936642
SN - 0002-7642
VL - 61
SP - 986
EP - 1001
JO - American Behavioral Scientist
JF - American Behavioral Scientist
IS - 9
ER -