What is it about?
Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.
Why is it important?
This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. The analysis deals with populist themes (the nation, the leader, oppositional discourse) by focusing on supporters rather than parties or political actors. It ultimately aims to foreground the motivations of the supporters as well as the type of identity (who is 'us' as opposed to 'them') the audience builds through their comments.