What kind of populism? Tone and targets in the Twitter discourse of French and American presidential candidates

Abstract

Insurgent candidates from across the political spectrum are increasingly turning to social media to directly engage the public. Social media offer a platform that favours affect and personality, both key components of populist-style rhetoric, a label that is often attached to politicians outside the political establishment. Despite noteworthy exceptions, few cross-national studies of high-profile candidates’ use of social media exist, and even less is known about how candidates representing various political ideologies employ affect alongside populism. To advance the state-of-the-art, this study examines the sentiment and rhetorical targets of attack in the Twitter feeds (N = 25,825 tweets) of six presidential candidates in the United States and French election campaigns of 2016 and 2017. Employing dictionary-based quantitative analysis, the study finds variation among the candidates’ rhetoric in terms of how they employ populist themes, affect and ideology. The findings suggest that scholars should consider a more nuanced approach to populism in late-modern democracies.