Book review: what is populism? by Jan-Werner Müller

In What is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller provides a timely perspective on the pressing question of what populism is and how to respond to it. Defining populism as anti-pluralist, elite-critical politics with a moral claim to representation, he cautions that populists are both willing and able to govern and may therefore deform democracy by turning states towards partisanship. This short book is a recommended read for academics as well as the wider public, writes Theresa Gessler

Experiments in the laboratory of populism: the 2018 Hungarian election

Parliamentary elections will be held in Hungary on 8 April. Theresa Gessler and Johannes Wachs preview the vote, noting that although the governing Fidesz party has a sizeable polling lead, the contest promises to be closer than the last parliamentary election four years ago

How the refugee crisis and radical right parties shape party competition on immigration

While the structure of party competition evolves slowly, crisis-like events can induce short-term change to the political agenda. This may be facilitated by challenger parties who might benefit from increased attention to issues they own. We study the dynamic of such shifts through mainstream parties’ response to the 2015 refugee crisis, which strongly affected public debate and election outcomes across Europe. Specifically, we analyse how parties changed their issue emphasis and positions regarding immigration before, during, and after the refugee crisis. Our study is based on a corpus of 120,000 press releases between 2013 and 2017 from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We identify immigration-related press releases using a novel dictionary and estimate party positions. The resulting monthly salience and positions measures allow for studying changes in close time-intervals, providing crucial detail for disentangling the impact of the crisis itself and the contribution of right-wing parties. While we provide evidence that attention to immigration increased drastically for all parties during the crisis, radical right parties drove the attention of mainstream parties. However, the attention of mainstream parties to immigration decreased toward the end of the refugee crisis and there is limited evidence of parties accommodating the positions of the radical right

How Do Populist Radical Right Parties Differentiate their Appeal? Evidence from the Media Strategy of the Hungarian Jobbik Party

As they become more successful, populist radical right parties face a tension between keeping their nativist credentials and moderating their appeal to gain new voters. We argue that differentiating party messages to core supporters and the wider electorate allows parties to pursue both goals. We outline and empirically illustrate the previously underexplored phenomenon of selective messaging based on the communication strategy of the Hungarian Jobbik party throughout its lifespan (2006-19) in partisan outlets, press releases and Facebook. Using a dictionary approach, we map the co-evolution of populist and nativist mobilization under conditions of supply- and demand-side changes. Our results show the decline and transformation of Jobbik's nativist appeal, and an increasing reliance on populism. The trend is not uniform; Jobbik relies on nativism as a function of targeting party identifiers or the general electorate in specific media outlets. Our findings show the importance of mapping parties’ programmatic appeal across platforms and over time

Political conflict on immigration and democracy in Europe

Defence date: 9 december 2019Examining Board: Prof. Dorothee Bohle, European University Institute; Prof. Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, University of Bergen; Prof. Heike Klüver, Humboldt University Berlin; Prof. Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute (Supervisor)This thesis is a collection of five empirical studies that analyze political competition on immigration and democracy in Europe. The thesis investigates how policy issues related to these two policy domains become politicized, both in terms of citizens’ attitudes and in terms of party competition. The thesis contributes to the investigation of the driving forces of competition on cultural and political issues. The first two chapters of the thesis analyze the dynamics of attitudinal change among citizens by asking (i) how Eastern Europeans’ conceptions of democracy have changed since the transition to democracy and (ii) how short-term exposure to refugees influences attitudes and voting behavior. The following two chapters focus on party competition and investigate (iii) to what extent and why parties politicize democratic systems in their election campaigns, and (iv) how the refugee crisis allowed radical right parties to increase the politicization of the immigration issue. Finally, a comparative chapter adds to the previous chapters by studying (v) how the discourse on immigration and democracy of established parties changes when they are challenged by a new competitor. To show the trajectory of competition on immigration and democratic systems, the thesis draws on a wide range of empirical evidence stemming from Eastern, North-Western and Southern Europe. To detail the parties’ emphasis and positions on issues on a monthly basis, it leverages a novel dataset of 120,000 party press releases. In addition to quantitative text analysis techniques – including structural topic models and wordscores – the thesis relies on classical content analysis and on the analysis of surveys and election outcomes. The empirical analyses reveal two different dynamics of politicization of policy issues: While attitudes and party mobilization on democracy-related issues follow long-term trends, recent change to political conflict related to immigration was shaped by the context of the refugee crisis

First-order linkage analysis (Frequently Applied Designs)

First-order linkage analyses (Schulz, 2008) employ individual survey data weighted by aggregated content data and are generally used to investigate media effects on public opinion. In contrast to experiments, their outcomes are highly generalizable since they allow to grasp what kind of content people encounter in a naturalistic setting (Barabas & Jerit, 2009), with which frequency and intensity, and how it triggers a particular reaction, attitude change, knowledge gain or behavior. First-order linkage analyses often employ manual and automated content analysis, descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. When using panel data, they are furthermore able to identify within-individual changes in attitudes and behaviors (e.g. Takens et al., 2015).   Field of application/theoretical foundation: Linkage analyses have extensively been used in the fields of political communication and public opinion, EU studies and media and political psychology. Studies that employed first-order linkage analyses are concerned with theories of agenda setting (Erbring et al., 1980), visibility, priming and media attention on public opinion dynamics (e.g. Bos et al., 2011); news media tone (Hopmann et al., 2010), or the impact of exposure to counter-attitudinal views through the media (Matthes, 2012) on voting decisiveness and behavior. Framing studies or studies focusing on journalistic styles have also made extant use of linkage analysis (e.g. Jebril et al., 2013;  Schuck et al., 2014) (see chapter Content Analysis in Mixed Method approaches for a detailed account of uses, applications and advantages of using linkage analyses).   References Barabas, J., & Jerit, J. (2009). Estimating the Causal Effects of Media Coverage on Policy-Specific Knowledge. American Journal of Political Science, 53(1), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2008.00358.x Boomgaarden, H. G., Van Spanje, J., Vliegenthart, R., & De Vreese, C. H. (2011). Covering the crisis: Media coverage of the economic crisis and citizens’ economic expectations. Acta Politica, 46(4), 353–379. Bos, L., Van der Brug, W., & De Vreese, C. (2011). How the media shape perceptions of right-wing populist leaders. Political Communication, 28(2), 182–206. Castro Herrero, L., & Hopmann, D. N. (2017). The Virtue of Moderation: A Cross-National Analysis of Exposure to Cross-Cutting Information and Turnout. International Journal of Public Opinion Research. Castro, L., Nir, L., & Skovsgaard, M. (2018). Bridging Gaps in Cross-Cutting Media Exposure: The Role of Public Service Broadcasting. Political Communication, 1–24. De Vreese, C. H., Boukes, M., Schuck, A., Vliegenthart, R., Bos, L., & Lelkes, Y. (2017). Linking survey and media content data: Opportunities, considerations, and pitfalls. Communication Methods and Measures, 11(4), 221–244. Erbring, L., Goldenberg, E. N., & Miller, A. H. (1980). Front-page news and real-world cues: A new look at agenda-setting by the media. American Journal of Political Science, 16–49. Hopmann, D. N., Vliegenthart, R., De Vreese, C., & Alb\a ek, E. (2010). Effects of election news coverage: How visibility and tone influence party choice. Political Communication, 27(4), 389–405. Jebril, N., Albaek, E., & De Vreese, C. H. (2013). Infotainment, cynicism and democracy: The effects of privatization vs personalization in the news. European Journal of Communication, 28(2), 105–121. Matthes, J. (2012). Exposure to counterattitudinal news coverage and the timing of voting decisions. Communication Research, 39(2), 147–169. Schuck, A. R., Vliegenthart, R., & De Vreese, C. H. (2014). Who’s Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News. British Journal of Political Science, 1–18. Schulz, W. (2008). Content analyses and public opinion research. The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research, 348–357. Takens, J., Kleinnijenhuis, J., Van Hoof, A., & Van Atteveldt, W. (2015). Party leaders in the media and voting behavior: Priming rather than learning or projection. Political Communication, 32(2), 249–267. Vreese, C. H. D., & Semetko, H. A. (2004). News matters: Influences on the vote in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign. European Journal of Political Research, 43(5), 699–722. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0304-4130.2004.00171.x   Table 1. Data matching in first-order linkage analyses Author(s) Relationship of theoretical interest Sample Time frame Content-analytical constructs Linkage strategy Boomgaarden et al., 2011 How exposure to media coverage of the 2008-2009 economic crisis affected expectations regarding the future development of the national economic situation (a) Predictions or expectations about the economic situations provided by articles of nine newspapers and items from 2 news bulletins in the Netherlands in the period between wave 1 and wave 2 of the survey below-mentioned. For w2 to w3, only the front pages of newspapers were coded. (b) 976 respondents of a three-wave panel survey conducted in the Netherlands between November 2008 to February 2009 Nov 2008- Feb 2009 “Expectation, assumption or prediction of the personal economic situation of the Dutch people/the Dutch economy” and whether these are negative, neutral or positive (Boomgaarden et al., 2011, p. 361) (1) Calculation of number of positive and negative economic expectations/assumptions/predictions per outlet (negative (-2), rather negative (-1), balanced (0), rather positive (1), positive (2)) for either the Dutch economy or the Dutch people. Negative evaluations are weighted twice since people tend to select negative information in greater numbers. (2) Each survey respondent’s frequency of use of each outlet is weighted (multiplied) by each outlet’s aggregated score for each relevant content characteristic outlined above, and regressed on people’s actual economic expectations for the country and for themselves. De Vreese et al. 2017 How exposure to economic news (visibility and tone) predicts respondents’ expectations about the state of the national economy in the coming 12 months (a) 1,211 hand-coded articles evaluating the state of the Dutch economy in Dutch national newspapers   (b) Three-wave panel data from a surveyed representative sample of the Dutch population Feb-June 2015 (Negative, neutral or positive) tone towards the Dutch economy (1) The authors construct a variable in a content-analysed dataset measuring a tone scale per news article, ranging from -2 (completely negative) to 2 (completely positive)   (2) Publication recency for each article (how close in time the article was published to when respondents were surveyed) and prominence of each article (operationalized as how long the article was compared to average article length) were used to create weighted measures, in order to test whether more recent and more lengthy evaluative articles had stronger effects on economic perceptions, as compared to an unweighted variable.   (3) Observations at the article level were then aggregated at the wave-outlet level in a new dataset containing information on total number of articles with evaluations of the economy, tone, and the two weighted measures above-mentioned per outlet in each wave.   (4) The linkage was done using the survey dataset. For each individual i in wave w a score of the amount of evaluative news (visibility), the positive, neutral or negative connotation of such news (tone) and the weighed variables (weighted tone by recency and prominence) was calculated for each newspaper they read on a weekly basis. The final computation can be illustrated as follows:   For each individual i and wave w, Where k stands for outlet, =1 if individual i reads outlet k and 0 otherwise, and j denotes article and Nkw is the set of articles with evaluative news published by outlet k in wave w. Yj  can denote one of three possibilities: Above, tj captures tone of an article,  rj captures recency and lj is a measure of article length.   (5) A series of OLS regression analyses were finally performed, with respondents’ expectations on the economy as dependent variable, exposure to media evaluations of the economy (tone), the weighted tone variables and lagged dependent variables as predictors. Castro, Nir & Skovsgaard (2018) How political interest and public service broadcasting strength impact cross-cutting, or counter-attitudinal media exposure; and whether public service media moderates the effect of political interest on cross-cutting exposure (a) 48,983 news stories from three newspapers and two TV news bulletins across 27 EU countries, collected by the European Election Media Study during the June 2009 European election campaign (May 14 to June 4 for some countries, up to May 17 to June 7 for others). Among such stories, 3,390 news evaluations on the national government’s record were identified and used to build the media content component of a cross-cutting media exposure measure.   (b)Self-reported news media exposure and political interest from 27,079 individuals in 27 EU countries surveyed by the European Election Study consortium during the three weeks following the June 2009 European Parliament elections. May-June 2009 Tone toward the national government (positive (1), balanced/mixed (0), negative (–1) (1) A variable that accounts for the extent to which an individual approves (1) or disapproves (– 1) of the government’ s performance to date is built. (2) The mean of each national government’ s positive (1), balanced/mixed (0), or negative (– 1) evaluations found in each media outlet’ s news stories is computed. (3) Cross-cutting exposure is calculated by accounting for the absolute difference between each individual’ s approval of their government and the average degree for each media outlet this individual uses at least once a week, averaged by the number of news media outlets they follow. (4) Random-intercept regression models, using individual exposure to cross-cutting information as the dependent variable, and political interest, public service broadcasting strength (audience share) and an interaction between both as main independent variables, are run. This allows to account for the hierarchical structure of the data by decomposing individual and country-level variances, and also to explain the relationship between cross-cutting news media exposure and political interest, considering contextual interactions (i.e., with public service broadcasting strength).   See Appendix B of the paper for the exact formula and a more detailed account of how scores are calculated for each individual and media outlet

Correlational linkage analysis (Frequently Applied Designs)

Correlational or second-order linkage analyses (Schulz, 2008) correlate content data points and survey data at the aggregate level. They are generally used to infer the impact of public opinion climate, the media context or media use on individual attitudes, cognitions and behaviors. Correlational linkage analyses make use of data collected at different points in time to be able to describe patterns of change and stability over time and to compensate for the reduced number of observations resulting from aggregating individual-level data. They often employ manual and automated content analysis, descriptive and inferential statistical analyses, and time series analysis.   Field of application/theoretical foundation: Linkage analyses have extensively been used in the fields of political communication (Soroka, 2002), EU studies (Brosius et al., 2019a), and more recently, social media and social movements. Studies that employed second-order linkage analyses are related to theories of agenda setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), framing (Vliegenthart et al., 2008), or media bias and tone (Brosius et al., 2019b) (see chapter Content Analysis in Mixed Method approaches for a detailed account of applications and advantages of using linkage analyses).   Example studies: In this data entry we describe two studies that regress survey data on media content data with additional weighs to better model news media effects. The first study (Boomgaarden & Vliegenthart, 2007) weigh  media coverage of a particular topic (immigration) by issue prominence and circulation of the newspapers considered in the study. The second one (Vliegenthart et al., 2008) further introduces a publication recency moderator to account for how close in time a given news story was published from when survey data was collected and individuals may have been exposed to such piece of information.   References Boomgaarden, H. G., & Vliegenthart, R. (2007). Explaining the rise of anti-immigrant parties: The role of news media content. Electoral Studies, 26(2), 404–417. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2006.10.018 Brosius, A., van Elsas, E. J., & de Vreese, C. H. (2019a). Trust in the European Union: Effects of the information environment. European Journal of Communication, 34(1), 57–73. Brosius, A., van Elsas, E. J., & de Vreese, C. H. (2019b). How media shape political trust: News coverage of immigration and its effects on trust in the European Union. European Union Politics, 20(3), 447–467. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116519841706 McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187. Schulz, W. (2008). Content analyses and public opinion research. The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research, 348–357. Soroka, S. N. (2002). Issue attributes and agenda-setting by media, the public, and policymakers in Canada. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 14(3), 264–285. Vliegenthart, R., Schuck, A. R., Boomgaarden, H. G., & De Vreese, C. H. (2008). News coverage and support for European integration, 1990–2006. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 20(4), 415–439.   Table 1. Data matching in correlational linkage analyses Author(s) Relationship of theoretical interest Sample Time frame Content-analytical constructs Linkage strategy Boomgarden & Vliegenthart (2007) News media reporting about immigration-related topics on aggregate share of vote intention for anti-immigrant parties (a) 157,968 articles collected through computer-assisted analysis, dealing with immigration and published in the five most-read Dutch national newspapers   (b) Monthly self-reports on vote intention toward anti-immigrant parties from surveyed representative samples of the Dutch population   (c) Monthly number of people that moved to the Netherlands and unemployment rates available from the Dutch governmental statistical institute 1990-2002 Visibility of immigration-related topics in news (1) The authors calculate a visibility score per article by computing:   (1.1.) an average person’s log probability that s/he is exposed to news about immigration through a given article. This is done by using the frequency with which this article mentions immigration-related topics (f(t,a), both in the headline (fh(t,a)), in which case the frequency is weighed by 8, and in the body of the text (fb(t,a)), in which case the frequency is multiplied by 2.    (1.2.) 1.1. is weighed by circulation of the newspaper where the article is published (c(a)).   (1.3.) 1.1. is weighed by whether the article is placed in the front page or other to account for how prominently the topic is featured (fp(a)).   Notationally, the equation can be written as follows: (2) In a second step, V(a) are aggregated for all articles in all outlets by month (the time unit to link content and survey data)   (3) Final immigration visibility scores (independent variable) are linked to monthly percentage of people that reported intending to vote for an anti-immigration party (dependent variable) through time series analysis. The authors run ARIMA models, successively adding controls for extreme right leadership peaks (Fortuyn’s entrance in the political arena and assassination), immigration levels, unemployment rates, the interaction between the both and finally, the media visibility variables. Vliegenthart, Schuck, Boomgaarden, De Vreese (2008) How framing of EU news in terms of benefit and conflict explains public support for the EU (a) 329,746 articles that contained at least one reference to the European institutions in main newspapers of 7 EU countries (Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom) were computer-assisted content analysed to obtain data on EU media visibility.   (b) 9,649 hand-coded articles that mentioned the EU at least twice (at least one of these references in the headline or in the lead of the article) were then analysed to investigate the framing of the EU. Approximately 50 articles per country were coded for each 6-month period.   (c) Self-reports on EU support from the bi-annual standard Eurobarometer. 1990–2006 (a) News media attention/visibility of the EU (b) Presence of a benefit frame or a disadavantage frame in EU news coverage © Presence of a conflict framing in EU news coverage (1) Articles dealing with the EU (at least one reference) are weighed by prominence and publication recency as follows: Articles on the first page of a newspaper are counted twice as heavily as articles in the remainder of the newspaper;  articles appearing in the month before a Eurobarometer survey was conducted are weighed six times, they are counted five times if appeared 2 months before, etc. The weighted EU visibility score is aggregated for each time period t in each country c.   (2) Framing scores are then assigned to each article (benefit and disadvantage frames 0-2, conflict framing ranged from 0 to 3)   (3) Mean framing scores per time period–country combination (fs(t,c)) are multiplied by visibility scores (vs(t,c)) to capture the overall salience of the frames (beyond its presence) as follows: (4) OLS regressions with panel corrected standard errors are run with benefit, disadvantage and conflict framing as main independent variables, and aggregated-level support for the EU as dependent variable

Issue Ownership and Agenda Setting in the 2019 Swiss National Elections

The 2019 Swiss national elections were characterized by the unusual prominence of two issues, environment and gender, whereas two staples of Swiss politics, immigration and Europe, were less dominant compared to previous elections. We study how, in this context, the media and party agenda were linked to issue ownership. Specifically, we consider whether political parties that own an issue could lead the media agenda and the agenda of other parties. Our analysis relies on all tweets and press releases of major Swiss political parties from January to October 2019 and 37,225 newspaper articles published during the same period. Results show, first, that the agenda-setting capacity of parties was restricted to the gender issue, and second, that the link between issue ownership and agenda setting is ambiguous. These findings suggest that during election campaigns, agenda setting may be largely exogenous to both parties and media

Social media and policy responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic in Switzerland

We study the role of social media in debates regarding two policy responses to COVID-19 in Switzerland: face-mask rules and contact-tracing apps. We use a dictionary classifier to categorize 612'177 tweets by parties, politicians, and the public as well as 441'458 articles published in 76 newspapers between February and August 2020. We distinguish between “problem” (COVID-19) and “solutions” (face masks and contact-tracing apps) and, using a vector autoregression approach, we analyze the relationship between their salience on social and traditional media, as well as among different groups on social media. We find that overall attention to COVID-19 was not driven by endogenous dynamics between the different actors. By contrast, the debate on face masks was led by the attentive public and by politicians, whereas parties and newspapers followed. The results illustrate how social media challenge the capacity of party and media elites to craft a consensus regarding the appropriateness of different measures as responses to a major crisis. Wir analysieren die Funktion sozialer Medien in Debatten über zwei politische Strategien zur Eindämmung von COVID-19 in der Schweiz: das Maskenpflicht und die Kontaktverfolgungs-App. Wir verwenden einen stichwortbasierten Klassifikationsalgorithmus, um 612177 Tweets von Parteien, Politiker:innen und der Öffentlichkeit sowie 441458 Artikel aus 76 Zeitungen zu kategorisieren, die von Februar bis August 2020 veröffentlicht wurden. Wir unterscheiden zwischen „Problem’“ (COVID-19) und „Lösungen“ (Maskenpflicht und Kontaktverfolgungs-App). Mittels eines Vektor-Autoregressions-Modelles analysieren wir die Wechselbeziehung zwischen der Prävalenz dieser Themen in sozialen und traditionellen Medien sowie zwischen verschiedenen Gruppen in den sozialen Medien. Wir zeigen, dass der Fokus auf COVID-19 nicht von endogenen Dynamiken zwischen den verschiedenen Akteuren angetrieben wurde. Vielmehr wurde die Debatte über Gesichtsmasken von der interessierten Öffentlichkeit und von Politiker:innen angeführt. Die Ergebnisse veranschaulichen, wie soziale Medien die Fähigkeit von Partei- und Medieneliten herausfordern, einen Konsens über die Angemessenheit verschiedener Massnahmen als Reaktion auf eine Krise zu schaffen

No country for asylum seekers? How short-term exposure to refugees influences attitudes and voting behavior in Hungary

How does exposure to refugees influence political behavior? We present evidence from Hungary, a country with widespread anti-immigration attitudes, that short term exposure during the 2015 refugee crisis predicts anti-refugee voting and sentiment. We code exposure to refugees at the settlement level using reports from state media, an independent online news site, and an online social media aggregator. Settlements through which refugees traveled showed significantly higher anti-refugee voting in a national referendum in 2016. The effect decreases sharply with distance. Using a difference-in-differences model, we find that the far-right opposition gained, while the governing right-wing party lost votes in these settlements in subsequent parliamentary elections. This suggests incumbents are punished by voters skeptical of immigration regardless of their policy position. Survey data supports this finding of a competition among right-wing parties, as individuals in exposed settlements are more fearful of immigrants and support restrictive policies only if they identify as right-wing