The success of populist political actors in Western democracies and the dramatization and emotionality of political communication in news media have been the object of several theoretical and empirical studies in the past decade. It has been argued that the mediatization of politics and the convergence of populist and tabloid communication styles foster these developments by mutual promotion in mass communication. This article uses a cross-national quantitative content analysis to disentangle associations among news genres, populist actors, content, and style. In spite of indisputable prevalence of populist styles in tabloid style media, populist ideology is identified as their strongest source.
AbtsK.RummensS. (2007). Populism versus democracy. Political Studies, 55, 405-424. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00657.x
2.
AlbertazziD.McDonnellD. (2008). Introduction: The sceptre and the spectre. In AlbertazziD.McDonnellD. (Eds.), Twenty-first century populism. The spectre of Western European democracy (pp. 1-11). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
3.
BaleT.Green-PedersenC.KrouwelA.LutherK. R.SitterN. (2010). If you can’t beat them, join them? Explaining social democratic responses to the challenge from the populist radical right in Western Europe. Political Studies, 58, 410-426. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00783.x
4.
BaleT.van KesselS.TaggartP. (2011). Thrown around with abandon? Popular understandings of populism as conveyed by the print media: A UK case study. Acta Politica, 46, 111-131. doi:10.1057/ap.2011.3
5.
BarrR. R. (2009). Populists, outsiders and anti-establishment politics. Party Politics, 15, 29-48. doi:10.1177/1354068808097890
6.
BosL.BrantsK. (2014). Populist rhetoric in politics and media: A longitudinal study of the Netherlands. European Journal of Communication, 29, 703-719. doi:10.1177/0267323114545709
7.
BosL.van der BrugW. (2010). Public images of leaders of anti-immigration parties: Perceptions of legitimacy and effectiveness. Party Politics, 16, 777-799. doi:10.1177/1354068809346004
8.
BosL.van der BrugW.de VreeseC. (2010). Media coverage of right-wing populist leaders. Communications, 35, 141-163. doi:10.1515/comm.2010.008
9.
BrennanR. L.PredigerD. J. (1981). Coefficient kappa: Some uses, misuses, and alternatives. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 41, 687-699. doi:10.1177/001316448104100307
10.
CanovanM. (1999). Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy. Political Studies, 47, 2-16. doi:10.1111/1467-9248.00184
11.
EsserF. (1999). “Tabloidization” of news: A comparative analysis of Anglo-American and German press journalism. European Journal of Communication, 14, 291-324. doi:10.1177/0267323199014003001
12.
EsserF. (2013). Mediatization as a challenge: Media logic versus political logic. In KriesiH.LavenexS.EsserF.MatthesJ.BühlmannM.BochslerD. (Eds.), Democracy in the age of globalization and mediatization (pp. 155-176). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
13.
HallinD. C. (1992). The passing of the “high modernism” of American journalism. Journal of Communication, 42(3), 14-25.
14.
HartlebF. (2015). Here to stay: Anti-establishment parties in Europe. European View, 14, 39-49. doi:10.1007/s12290-015-0348-4
15.
JagersJ.WalgraveS. (2007). Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties’ discourse in Belgium. European Journal of Political Research, 46, 319-345. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6765.2006.00690.x
16.
JunU. (2006). Populismus als Regierungsstil in westeuropäischen Parteiendemokratien: Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien [Populism as political style in western European representative democracies: Germany, France, and Great Britain]. In DeckerF. (Ed.), Populismus. Gefahr für die Demokratie oder nützliches korrektiv? (pp. 233-254). Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
17.
KrämerB. (2017). Populist and non-populist media. In HeinischR.Holtz-BachaC.MazzoleniO. (Eds.), Political populism. A handbook (pp. 405-420). Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos.
18.
KriesiH. (2018). Revisiting the populist challenge. Politologický Casopis; Czech Journal of Political Science, 25(1), 5-27.
19.
MaginM. (2017). Attention, please! Structural influences on tabloidization of campaign coverage in German and Austrian elite newspapers (1949-2009). Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/1464884917707843
20.
MazzoleniG. (2008a). Media logic. In DonsbachW. (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of communication (pp. 2930-2932). Malden. MA: Blackwell.
21.
MazzoleniG. (2008b). Mediatization of politics. In DonsbachW. (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of communication (pp. 3047-3051). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
22.
MazzoleniG. (2008c). Populism and the media. In AlbertazziD.McDonnellD. (Eds.), Twenty-first century populism. The spectre of Western European democracy (pp. 49-64). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
23.
MazzoleniG.StewartJ.HorsfieldB. (Eds.). (2003). The media and neo-populism: A contemporary comparative analysis. Westport, CT: Praeger.
24.
MitchellA.GottfriedJ.BarthelM.ShearerE. (2016). The modern news consumer. New York, NY: Pew Research Center.
25.
MoffittB. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
26.
MuddeC. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39, 542-563. doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x
27.
MuddeC. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
28.
NeveuE. (2002). Four generations of political journalism. In KuhnR.NeveuE. (Eds.), Political journalism. New challenges, new practices (pp. 22-43). London, England: Routledge.
29.
PlasserF.UlramP. A. (2003). Striking a responsive chord: Mass media and right-wing populism in Austria. In MazzoleniG.StewartJ.HorsfieldB. (Eds.), The media and neo-populism. A contemporary comparative analysis (pp. 21-43). Westport, CT: Praeger.
30.
RooduijnM.de LangeS. L.van der BrugW. (2014). A populist zeitgeist? Programmatic contagion by populist parties in Western Europe. Party Politics, 20, 563-575. doi:10.1177/1354068811436065
31.
RooduijnM.PauwelsT. (2011). Measuring populism: Comparing two methods of content analysis. West European Politics, 34, 1272-1283. doi:10.1080/01402382.2011.616665
32.
ShehataA.StrömbäckJ. (2014). Mediatization of political realities: Media as crucial sources of information. In EsserF.StrömbäckJ. (Eds.), Mediatization of politics: Understanding the transformation of western democracies (pp. 93-113). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
33.
SkovsgaardM. (2014). A tabloid mind? Professional values and organizational pressures as explanations of tabloid journalism. Media, Culture & Society, 36, 200-218. doi:10.1177/0163443713515740
34.
SparksC.TullochJ. (2000). Critical Media Studies. Tabloid tales: Global debates over media standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
35.
StrömbäckJ. (2008). Four phases of mediatization: An analysis of the mediatization of politics. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 13, 228-246. doi:10.1177/1940161208319097
36.
StrömbäckJ.EsserF. (2014). Mediatization of politics: Transforming democracies and reshaping politics. In LundbyK. (Ed.), Mediatization of communication (pp. 375-403). Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter.
37.
TjurT. (2009). Coefficients of determination in logistic regression models—A new proposal: The coefficient of discrimination. The American Statistician, 63, 366-372. doi:10.1198/tast.2009.08210
38.
UmbrichtA.EsserF. (2016). The push to popularize politics: Understanding the audience-friendly packaging of political news in six media systems since the 1960s. Journalism Studies, 17, 100-121.
39.
van KesselS. (2015). Populist parties in Europe: Agents of discontent?Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
40.
WalgraveS.de SwertK. (2004). The making of the (issues of the) Vlaams Blok. Political Communication, 21, 479-500. doi:10.1080/10584600490522743
41.
WettsteinM.EsserF.SchulzA.WirzD.WirthW. (2018). News media as gatekeepers, critics and initiators of populist communication: How journalists in ten countries deal with the populist challenge. International Journal of Press/Politics, 23, 476-495.
42.
WeylandK. (2017). Populism: A political-strategic approach. In KaltwasserC. R.TaggartP.EspejoP. O.OstiguyP. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of populism (pp. 48-72). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
43.
WirthW.EsserF.WettsteinM.EngesserS.WirzD.SchulzA.SchemerC. (2016). The appeal of populist ideas, strategies, and styles: A theoretical model and research design for analyzing populist political communication (NCCR Working Paper No. 88). Retrieved from https://www.ikmz.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:c31648f8-2736-4155-9db2-1137a1983780/WP_88.pdf. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20358.37440
44.
WodakR. (2015). The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. London, England: SAGE.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
