Populism and social media popularity: how populist communication benefits political leaders on Facebook and Twitter

Research has shown that social media is a particularly well-suited channel for distributing populist messages. However, it has hardly been explored what type of audience reactions populist communication triggers on social media and whether populist political leaders garner more support online than political leaders who do not represent populist views or communicate in a populist way. In this chapter, we address these open questions. We define populist communication, review recent research on populist online communication, and describe what we learned when we analyzed the tweets and Facebook posts of 36 diverse political leaders in six countries over a three-month period