The Mesmerising Message: The Diffusion of Populism in Public Debates in Western European Media
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12074 |
| Author | Matthijs Rooduijn |
| Subject Matter | Article |
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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 4 VO L 6 2 , 7 2 6 – 7 4 4
doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12074
The Mesmerising Message: The Diffusion
of Populism in Public Debates in Western
European Media
Matthijs Rooduijn
University of Amsterdam
Electorally, Western European populist political parties have been rather successful in the last two decades. But how
pervasive is their actual populist message? Although some scholars have looked at the diffusion of this message, they
have only focused on the arena of party politics. Research on how widespread populism is beyond the party political
sphere is still in its infancy. This study looks at populism in public debates in the media. Based on a content analysis
of opinion articles in newspapers in five Western European countries, I demonstrate that these debates have become
more populist over the years, and that the degree of populism is strongly related to the success of populist parties.This
indicates that populism is more widespread than previously assumed. I also show that letters are more populist than
other opinion articles and that debates in tabloid media are not more populist than debates in elite media.
Keywords: populism; media; newspapers; content analysis; public debate
In the last two decades, Western European populist parties have become increasingly
successful. When scholars discuss the populist upsurge, they often refer to the increased
electoral success of populist parties.Yet the rise of populism involves more than increasing
vote shares of specific parties. To understand Western European populism fully, we should
not only focus on electoral politics, but also investigate the pervasiveness of the actual
populist message. Hitherto, some scholars have indeed focused on the diffusion of this
message.They have investigated whether mainstream parties have incorporated populism in
their own ideas and rhetoric (Mair, 2002; Mudde, 2004; Rooduijn et al., 2012). Yet to assess
fully how pervasive the populist message is, we should not only look at party politics.The
populist message might resonate in other spheres as well.
In this study I focus on two main questions: (1) Does the success of populist parties affect
the degree of populism in public debates in the media?; and (2) Have the public debates,
as a result, become more populist over the years? These are important questions, because if
it is true that the electoral success of populists has spawned a diffusion of the populist
message outside the realm of political parties, we can conclude that populism is more
widespread than previously assumed.
Moreover, ‘[a] full understanding of the populist phenomenon cannot be achieved
without studying mass communication perspectives and media-related dynamics, especially
not without using a comparative approach’ (Mazzoleni, 2003, p. 2).Therefore, another aim
of the study is to assess whether the degree of populism in public debates can be explained
by particular media-related characteristics. First, the literature suggests that it might be the
case that debates in tabloid media are more populist than debates in elite media (see
Akkerman, 2011; Mair, 2002; Mudde, 2007).And second, it could be expected that the type
© 2013 The Author. Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
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of contribution to the debates makes a difference: letters to the editor might be more
populist than other contributions to the debates (see Kerr and Moy, 2002; Wahl-Jorgensen,
2001; 2004).
The degree of populism in public debates is measured by means of a content analysis of
opinion articles in fifteen newspapers in five Western European countries: France, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These countries were selected because for
the purpose of this study it was essential to include countries with varying degrees of
success of populist parties. The focus is on opinion articles because they constitute one of
the most central spaces in which public debates are carried out (Day and Golan, 2005,
p. 62).
The article proceeds as follows. After the presentation of a definition of populism, I pay
attention to the questions that guide this investigation. In the following section I focus on
my research design, the operationalisation strategy and the method of analysis. Extensive
attention is paid to the content analysis with which I have measured how populist opinion
articles are. After the presentation of the most important descriptive and inferential results,
I discuss the implications of my findings and paths for future research.
Defining Populism
Scholars increasingly agree on a conceptualisation of populism as a set of ideas1 concerning
the antagonistic relationship between two homogeneous constructs: the (good) people and
the (evil) elite (see Abts and Rummens, 2007; Hawkins, 2009; 2010; Mudde, 2004; 2007;
Pauwels, 2011; Rooduijn and Pauwels, 2011; Stanley, 2008). In this study, I employ the
particular definition of Cas Mudde (2004, p. 543), who argues that populism is ‘[a
thin-centred] ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homo-
geneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which
argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the
people’.2
The central elements of this populist ideology are ‘people-centrism’ and ‘anti-elitism’.
These elements cannot be understood separately from each other because populism
concerns the specific relationship between the two (Laclau, 2005; Panizza, 2005). People-
centrism means that populists centralise the people and emphasise the idea of popular
sovereignty (Ionescu and Gellner, 1969; Mény and Surel, 2002). They see the people as a
homogeneous entity, devoid of divisions and argue that the will of the people should be the
point of departure of all politics (Taggart, 2000). The ‘people’ can mean many different
things to many different populists in many different circumstances: it could refer, for
instance, to the nation, to the electorate, to peasants and to the proletariat (Canovan, 1981;
Taggart, 2000). The elite is criticised because it is said to hamper the centrality of the
people. It is accused of having no idea what people find important and of being incom-
petent, arrogant and selfish (Barr, 2009; Canovan, 2002; Laclau, 2005; Mudde, 2004;
Weyland, 2001). The critique could be directed towards the political elite (parties, politi-
cians), the economic elite (bankers, the capitalist system) and/or the cultural elite (writers,
academics).
Some scholars have argued that populists also criticise ‘dangerous others’: groups – other
than elites – that are not considered part of what populists see as ‘their’ people (Albertazzi
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M AT T H I J S R O O D U I J N
and McDonnell, 2008; Taguieff, 1995). Other scholars, however, have argued that
exclusionism is a characteristic of the populist radical right only, and not of populism as such
(Canovan, 1981; Mudde, 2007; Taggart, 2000). They argue that populism can be combined
with many different ideologies, and that it only becomes exclusionistic once it is combined
with a radical right ideology. In this study I concur with this second group of scholars,
because I am not only interested in populism on the right side of the ideological spectrum,
but also in left-wing populism.
Populism as a thin-centred ideology is a set of ideas (see Hawkins, 2010). As such it is a
characteristic of a specific message rather than a characteristic of an actor sending that
message. A consequence of this conceptualisation is that populism can also be studied
outside the political realm. The focus of this study is on populism in spaces where many
messages of many different actors come together: public debates in the mass media.
Populism in Public Debates in the Media
Western European populist parties have had much electoral success in the last two decades
(e.g., the Front National (FN) in France, the Lega Nord (LN) in Italy, the Freiheitliche Partei
Österreichs in Austria, the Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark and the Lijst Pim Fortuyn in the
Netherlands). But has, as a result, the actual populist message also become more widespread?
The evidence so far is inconclusive. Cas Mudde (2004) and Peter Mair (2002) have focused
on the diffusion of populism in the realm of party politics and have argued that mainstream
parties have incorporated (elements of ) the populist message in their own rhetoric. Mudde
therefore talks about a populist Zeitgeist. Matthijs Rooduijn, Sarah De Lange and Wouter
Van der Brug (2012) have found, however, that with regard to their official political
programmes, mainstream parties have not become more populist over the years.Yet if we are
interested in the diffusion of populism, an exclusive focus on party politics would provide
a limited account of the spread of the populist message.The populist message might (also)
have become more pervasive beyond the party political sphere. It could, for instance, have
become more widespread in public debates in the media. If this should turn out to be the
case, we might conclude that populism is even more prevalent in Western European
societies than previously assumed.
The term ‘public debate’ has been employed by different scholars (see Koopmans and
Muis, 2009; Nikolaev and Porpora, 2007) and is defined...
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