Parties and Political Style on Facebook

Populist political parties are major beneficiaries of electoral discontent. Social media are well suited to disseminate negative perceptions of the current status quo. But to what extent are individual political parties actually adding fuel to the fire here? Specifically, which parties use social media to appeal to voters by accusing political elites of betrayal and by dramatizing alleged grievances?

WZB researcher Benjamin Schürmann and Johann Gründl from the University of Vienna have studied 3,500 individual Facebook posts from leading German politicians and major political parties from during 2017 federal electoral campaign. Their analysis has now been published by Political Research Exchange.

The possibilities of unfiltered communication in social media provide the perfect opportunity structure for spreading populist ideas. Generally, populist communication features an antagonistic worldview that blames elites for betraying the people and promises to reverse a ‘downward societal trend’ by bringing the people's ‘real’ interests back into politics. Although populist success is often attributed to crisis-induced dissatisfaction, research remains unclear on whether and how political actors foster such negative societal perceptions. Building on the German case, our paper accomplishes two things: It explores the use of populist social media communication and relates it to the exploitation of crisis-related messages among political parties. Conducting a manual content analysis of 3,500 Facebook posts by German parties and leading politicians, they find that the outsider parties AfD and the Left use and combine populist and crisis-related messages by far the most. Insider parties also spread crisis-related content to some extent. However, like the government parties, they are very reluctant to communicate in a populist way. By explaining the communicative output with their relative position in the party system, they deepen the understanding of parties’ social media behaviour. Overall, this study offers more in-depth insights into how politicians influence perceptions of the societal state.

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