The Populist Political Communication Style in Action: Podemos’s Issues and Functions on Twitter During the 2016 Spanish General Election
Abstract
Populism is a phenomenon that has been acquiring great relevance over recent years in the United States and Europe. Literature on the subject has identified the existence of a populist style that also affects political communication. The aim of this article is to analyze the structure of issues and the functions of messages circulated by a populist party in order to determine the presence and incidence of this style’s main components. The methodology is based on a quantitative analysis of the content of the Twitter profiles of the Spanish political party Podemos and its leader, Pablo Iglesias, during the 2016 Spanish elections. Totally, 2,612 tweets were analyzed. The results allow the identification of a strategy of complementarity, which appears as a new component in the communication style of populism in the digital environment. Podemos is also seen to lean toward antielitism and its leader toward the communicative construction of “the people.”
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Biographies
Andreu Casero-Ripollés is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Sciences at the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló (Spain). He is the former Director, and Founder, of Journalism Studies at the same university. He is a member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. He has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Columbia (United States) and Westminster (UK), among others. He studies political communication and the transformation of journalism in the digital environment.
Marçal Sintes-Olivella is Director of the Journalism and Corporate Communication Degree at the School of Communication and International Relations Blanquerna-Universitat Ramon Llull (Barcelona). He is the former Director of Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). His research interests mainly focus on media, politics and power.
Pere Franch is Lecturer of Journalism at the School of Communication and International Relations Blanquerna-Universitat Ramon Llull (Barcelona).
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Article first published online: May 3, 2017
Issue published: August 2017
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