Adapting to the different shades of populism: key findings and implications for media, citizens, and politics

This book started from several assumptions, the key one being that although the rise of populism can be regarded as an international trend, it may take different forms when investigated in an internationally comparative manner. This book set out to look systematically for both similarities and differences in populist political communication processes in a variety of European nations. The previous chapters presented findings from several large-scale and comparative studies of populist communication. They examined how politicians and journalists perceive populism and the role of the media and communication (Part I); populist elements in media coverage and the factors explaining their prevalenc (Part II); and cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral effects of populist communication, using cross-national survey embedded experiments (Part III). The purpose of this concluding chapter is two-fold. On the one hand, we want to tease out and summarize the key findings of the different chapters. What do these studies tell us, collectively? On the other hand, we want to extrapolate from these findings and the current literature to offer concrete stakeholder advice to politicians, journalists, and citizens who are all confronted with the challenge of populist politics and populist messages. For discussions of the limitations of this research and future research directions, we refer the reader back to the conclusions of the individual chapters where these are discussed in detail