Lived Populism: Mainstream Social Media and the Resurgence of The
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Universiteit van Amsterdam Lived Populism: Mainstream Social Media and the Resurgence of the Far Right in Portugal and Spain MA Thesis Programme: New Media and Digital Culture Vânia Raquel Leonardo Ferreira 31 August 2020 Leonardo Ferreira 2 Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... 3 Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 5 1. Theoretical framework ............................................................................................................... 7 1.1 Populism ............................................................................................................................ 7 1.2 Social media and electoral campaigning ........................................................................... 11 1.3 Platform vernaculars ........................................................................................................ 13 2. Methodology ........................................................................................................................... 15 2.1 Case studies ........................................................................................................................... 15 2.1.1 Portugal .......................................................................................................................... 15 2.1.2 Spain ............................................................................................................................... 17 2.2 Digital methods ..................................................................................................................... 19 2.3 Data ....................................................................................................................................... 21 3. Findings................................................................................................................................... 24 3.1 Facebook .............................................................................................................................. 24 3.1.1 CH and André Ventura .................................................................................................... 24 3.1.2 VOX and Santiago Abascal ............................................................................................. 40 3.2. Twitter ................................................................................................................................. 63 3.2.1 CH and André Ventura .................................................................................................... 63 3.2.2. VOX and Santiago Abascal ............................................................................................ 74 3.3 Instagram ............................................................................................................................. 99 3.3.1 CH .................................................................................................................................. 99 3.3.2 VOX and Santiago Abascal ........................................................................................... 103 3.4 YouTube ............................................................................................................................. 113 3.4.1 CH ................................................................................................................................ 113 3.4.2 VOX ............................................................................................................................. 115 4. Cross-country and cross-platform analysis ............................................................................. 118 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 121 References..................................................................................................................................... 123 Leonardo Ferreira 3 Acknowledgements This thesis is the culmination of a special journey, and I want to express my gratitude to all around me who contributed to make it possible, in particular to Bernhard Rieder, for the lively and inspirational supervision of this work; and to my colleagues and friends, especially to Marta. I am most indebted to my family and to my partner, who nourished me with love and encouragement. Leonardo Ferreira 4 Abstract Populist right-wing political actors have been succeeding in gaining power, at various levels, in liberal democracies across Europe and beyond. Spain and Portugal stood as the ‘exception’ in Europe until recently, losing this status in 2019 when far right-wing Spanish political party VOX and Portuguese Chega entered the respective national parliaments. Considering this recent change, these cases constitute an opportunity to empirically investigate the interplay between populism and social media, responding to the need for cross-country and cross- platform research. This study investigates VOX and Chega and their leader’s use of four main social media platforms–Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube–and how they succeed, attending to the interplay between populism, as a political style, and the platforms’ vernaculars, resorting to digital methods for the data collection and analysis, within a mixed-methods analytical approach. The findings show that the political actors’ populist performances succeed within an adaptation to the platforms, as populism is lived through the platforms’ vernaculars, showing the influential role of these platforms. Keywords Populism, social media, far right, digital methods, Portugal, Spain Leonardo Ferreira 5 Introduction Populist right-wing political actors have been succeeding in gaining power, at various levels, in liberal democracies across Europe and beyond, such as in Germany, Italy, or Brazil. Like with Trump, social media has been an important channel within their political communication strategy. Portugal and Spain stood as the ‘exception’ in Europe until recently, losing this status in 2019 when far right-wing Spanish political party VOX and Portuguese Chega entered the respective national parliaments. As social media has been conceived as conducive to populism (Gerbaudo), the end of the Iberian ‘exceptionalism’ constitutes an opportunity to empirically investigate the interplay between populism and social media. Although digital campaigns have been extensively studied, comparative studies taking a cross-country and multi-platform approach are still underdeveloped, to some extent owing to access limitations imposed by social media corporations, and to the growing complexity deriving from the platforms’ ever-evolving affordances, complicating the pursuit of comparative studies. However, as political actors do not operate in isolation in the current hybrid media system (Chadwick), this study responds to the need for cross-country and cross- platform research (De Vreese et al.; Engesser, Ernst, et al.; Serrano et al.). Along these lines, this paper investigates VOX and Chega and their leader’s use of four mainstream social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube – and how they succeed, attending to the interplay between populism and the platforms’ vernaculars. The methodological outlook is based on digital methods (Rogers, Digital Methods) following the medium for the collection and analysis of natively digital artefacts, in the case of this study each party and leader’s posts as issued from their public accounts, in the pre- and post-election periods of the latest general election. This allows to find similarities and differences and understand implications in two planes: between party and leader, as the leader is often the focus of discussion about populism, accounting for concerted campaigning endeavours; and between periods, to account for variation before and after securing electoral success. The most engaged-with posts were selected, in which case each platforms’ engagement measures were considered, as provided in the collected data. The content of the posts is analysed within a mixed-methods approach, to trace both populist and platformisation tendencies: in the first case, I take populism as a style of doing politics whose three key elements are the ‘appeal to ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and crisis, breakdown or threat’ (Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism 38, emphasis in original). To trace platformisation tendencies, I focus on identifying the ways in which the parties and the leaders Leonardo Ferreira 6 adapt their messages to the platforms’ vernaculars (Gibbs et al.; Meese et al.). The findings show that the political actors’ populist performances succeed within an adaptation to the platforms, as populism is lived through the platforms’ vernaculars, showing the influential role of these platforms. This paper unfolds as follows: the opening chapter provides the theoretical foundations, addressing populism, social media and electoral campaigning, and platform vernaculars. The second chapter pertains to the methodology: I contextualise the case studies, and the data collection and analysis. The third chapter encompasses the findings, followed by the fourth and last chapter,