Populism is on the rise in Europe. A COST Action has built a network of researchers who are studying how populism is being communicated. Results include two anthologies and a European Commission video award that will be part of an education package for high school students.
The COST Action ‘Populist Political Communication in Europe’ involved some 100 researchers from 31 countries in or around the European Union. In addition to the two anthologies, researchers published 61 articles about populist communication in peer-reviewed journals.
The Action held conferences on populist communication in several capitals across Europe as a means of bringing politicians, journalists and researchers together. For example, participants at the 2017 Paris Action Conference included the then vice president of the French Senate, Françoise Catron, who opened a lively debate about the history of French populism, among other topics.
“We wrote the proposal in 2012, before recent developments, when populism was an increasing phenomenon,” says Toril Aalberg, head of the sociology and political science department at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who was the network’s chair.
She believes that the COST Action filled an important gap in communication research. “Before, most researchers focused on a single candidate, party or country. It was a learning experience to see what we could achieve together,” she explains.
To help young people recognise populist information, Action researchers developed an ‘education package’ for use in high school curricula which includes short videos on populist communication. “We wanted to explain the phenomenon to young citizens so that they could identify similar actors and patterns in their own societies,” Aalberg says.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre recognised one of the videos with its EU4FACTS video award in September 2017.
In addition, the second of two Action Anthologies, part of a Routledge series on communication and media studies, will become available in April 2019 and will offer advice to politicians and journalists about how best to respond to populism. The first book was published in 2016.
No one size fits all
The network adopted three approaches: analysing the political strategies of populist communicators, media coverage of populists and their messages, and citizen engagement with populist communication. Among other things, researchers learned that even if there are similarities across countries, there are important national variations.
“The reactions to populism also depend on the context of the country,” Aalberg says. “For example, whether the populist party is part of the governing elite, or if they are in fact the government, or if the populist actors are new and only starting to rebel against established parties.”
Media coverage is also vital in determining whether populist messages will reach a broad audience, the researchers found. “It matters whether populists have direct access to media or own their own media,” she says.
One key take-away: populist movement must be analysed and understood on its own merits. “For the effects of populist messages, no one size fits all,” Aalberg concludes.
View the Action: https://www.cost.eu/actions/IS1308/
View the Network website: