Blaming in the name of our people: how attitudinal congruence conditions the effects of populist messages communicated by traditional media, politicians, and citizens

Abstract

Social Network Sites (SNSs) provide a platform for different actors to directly communicate populist ideas. Politicians and citizens can bypass elite media by directly speaking to the people via social media. Although a growing body of research has investigated the effects of populist messages, extant research has not explicitly compared how the dissemination of populism by (1) traditional media, (2) politicians, and (3) ordinary citizens can activate populist attitudes on the demand-side of the electorate. Relying on a comparative experiment in three countries (the US, UK, and the Netherlands, N = 1,096), this paper shows that the effects of populist messages on populist attitudes are contingent upon four factors: (1) the likelihood of selecting populist content in real life, (2) relative deprivation, (3) political cynicism, and (4) identification with the “ordinary people” as a source of populist ideas. There are no direct effects of populist communication by the news media, citizens, or politicians. Source cues on their own thus do not make populist communication more or less persuasive. Together, this study shows that people are most likely to be persuaded by populist messages when these messages confirm dissent, source identification, and media exposure patterns.