We, the … elites? Anti-elitism of governing populist parties in Poland, Greece, and Ukraine

Abstract

This article examines anti-elitist communication of populist actors in power, focusing on Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS), Greece’s left-wing SYRIZA, and Ukraine’s valence populist Servant of the People (SN). Using semantic text analysis and standardized content analysis, the study compares the parties’ anti-elitism on Facebook across four dimensions: sector (political versus non-political), specificity (generic versus specific), scope (national versus transnational), and the newly proposed dimension of temporal orientation (present versus past). The findings show that, despite their incumbent status, PiS, SYRIZA, and SN predominantly targeted political elites at the national level, instead of focusing on non-political and transnational elites, as some literature suggests. All three parties engaged in past-oriented anti-elitism to varying degrees, portraying former ruling elites as responsible for ongoing problems. The study enriches the literature on anti-elitism in power by broadening its geographic scope and incorporating diverse types of populist parties into the analysis