Hybrid Media and Populist Currents in Ireland's 2016 General Election

EJC0010.1177/0267323118775297European Journal of CommunicationSuiter et al. research-article7752972018

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European Journal of Communication 17–1 Hybrid media and populist © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: currents in Ireland’s 2016 sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118775297DOI: 10.1177/0267323118775297 General Election journals.sagepub.com/home/ejc

Jane Suiter and Eileen Culloty Dublin City University, Ireland

Derek Greene University College Dublin, Ireland

Eugenia Siapera Dublin City University, Ireland

Abstract Populism, or at the very least a ‘populist zeitgeist’ has advanced across the globe with populist actors from across the ideological spectrum at the forefront of politics in Europe, North and South America and Southeast Asia. One of the major components is the media and specifically hybrid media, which can inhibit or magnify populist political tendencies among both parties and voters. We utilised both hand-coded traditional media data and machine learning on social media data in order to disengage the hybrid media nuances for populist storytelling. We find that the media system in Ireland largely inhibits populist politics and messaging and thereby dampens all anti-out-group messaging. Thus, contrary to the literature identifying an inclination towards populism in some types of new media, and the emergence of media populism in similar media systems in the United States and the United Kingdom, we find that the Irish media, across all platforms, tend not to focus on populist messaging. In addition, the norms appear to bleed over to social media. These results are important because they potentially provide lessons for other European countries in covering populist actors and they contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of different kinds of media in the representation of populist politics.

Keywords Elections, hybrid media, mediatisation, populism

Corresponding author: Jane Suiter, School of Communications, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin, D09 Y5NO Ireland. Email: [email protected] 2 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

Introduction Much scholarly attention has been paid to the rapid spread of reactionary populism world- wide in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and in particular to a “populist zeitgeist” (Mudde 2004). Yet, a comparable form of populism has not been manifest in Ireland with no group or party espousing anti-out-group sentiment, rather populism appears confined to empty (simply references to ‘the people’) or left-wing varieties. This is particularly surprising, as recent conditions in Ireland appeared ripe for the emergence of populist actors (Kitching, 2013; McDonnell, 2008, Hernández and Kriesi 2016b). In the wake of economic collapse and an International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity programme, the party political system has fragmented and public disaffection with so-called elites has been manifest in a large-scale protest movement, while immigration has increased. This puzzle can be considered from a number of perspectives: party political (Farrell and Suiter, 2016; O’Malley, 2008) or the voters (Van Kessel, 2015). However, we argue that the media play a crucial role. In particular, hybridity of the media system (Chadwick, 2013) is open to both constraining and enabling a populist exploitation of oppositional political sentiment. Focusing on the 2016 Irish General Election, we show that there is successful anti-elite populism (evidenced by the voter volatility and record number of elected candidates from no party or small parties) and that hybrid media and disintermediation enables this anti-elite populism because it diminishes the traditional influence of professional news values. However, in terms of right-wing populism and anti-out-group sentiment we find the traditional media norms of balance and objectivity largely hold force and that anti-out-group rhetoric is largely absent. We argue that while populist rhetoric is more pronounced on new digital and social media because traditional journalism norms are likely to be less salient on these platforms and because politicians can utilise these platforms to communicate directly to the public, there appears to be some kind of spontaneous recovery of the middle ground as traditional norms appear to bleed over limiting some populist messaging, at least of the right-wing anti-out-group variety.

Understanding media populism Despite intensified scholarly interest in populism, and right-wing populism in particular, the subject remains difficult to define. In part, this stems from the ‘mercurial nature of populism’ (Stanley, 2008: 108) whereby its individual manifestations cut across histori- cal, geographical and ideological cleavages. Within comparative studies, there is general agreement that ‘populism is confrontational, chameleonic, culture-bound and context- dependent’ (Arter, 2010: 490). One fruitful approach is to define populism as a ‘thin- centred ideology’. In this vein, in his study of European populist parties, Mudde (2007) identifies four characteristics of populist ideology: the people are defined as a homogeneous and pure entity; the elite are defined as a homogeneous and corrupt entity; the people and the elite are defined as antagonistic groups; and direct forms of democratic participation, returning power to the people, are advocated. Others developing this defi- nition of a ‘thin’-centred ideology, identify the following three core characteristics: (1) populism focuses on the people, the homogeneous in-group; (2) the homogeneous in- group is threatened by the homogeneous out-group; and (3) there is an antagonistic Suiter et al. 3 division between the pure and blameless people versus the culprit out-group (Daenekindt et al., 2017). For left-wing populism, this out-group encompasses culprit political elites while for right-wing populism, it ranges from Islam to immigrants. Integrating the anti- out-group sentiment of right-wing populism also ensures that populism can be distin- guished from more general expressions of, for example, opposition to global economic elites and demands for more direct citizen representation. As Bale et al. (2011) note, without clear grounds for making these distinctions, the populist label could be applied to ‘any political actor who is in the news frequently for a substantial amount of time’. Accepting that populism involves political and ideological communication to publics implies that populists must use the media. Yet, despite their central importance, the role of the media in populism has been neglected as an area of systematic research. This is in part due to the depiction of the media as a neutral platform for populist messages within political science (Esser et al., 2017). The alternative, grounded in communication research, characterises the relationship between media and politics in terms of mediatisation (Mazzoleni, 2014); that is, the process by which political institutions ‘have become increasingly dependent on the media and have had to adapt to the logic of the media’ (Hjarvard, 2008: 107). Hence, a mediatisation perspective implies that certain media logics may reinforce or hamper specific communication styles such as populist discourse (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007; Moffitt and Tormey, 2014; Rooduijn et al., 2014). In the past decade, this has been complicated by the rise of online media including social net- works. As Chadwick (2013) argues, digital technologies engender a hybrid media system in which traditional news cycles are replaced with more dynamic information cycles. Access to decentralised online and social communication platforms creates ‘new opportunities for non-elite actors to mobilize and enter the news making process’ (Chadwick, 2013: 6). At the same time, media outlets, both old and new, become increasingly inter- dependent and forced into a process of continual adaptation. How might this affect populist communication? To answer this question, it is helpful to turn to a valuable distinction developed by Esser et al. (2017), who set out a typology of the relationship between media and populism: populism by the media, populism through the media and populism through citizen journalism. Populism by the media refers to media that engage in their own kind of populism and recalls the earlier work of scholars identifying populism with commercial TV and tabloid newspapers. Here, the media tend to present elections as a game, focus on the will of the people through opinion polls and portray politicians with an attitude of antagonism and, increasingly, cynicism (Akkerman, 2011; Stanyer, 2007). Politics is thereby represented as a game of U-turns, personalities and winning tactics with little thought for policy debates, experts or the nature of political compromise (Anderson, 2010; Mastropaolo, 2012). The cumulative impact of populism by the media is a general cynicism towards politics (Wayne and Murray, 2009) and sweeping popularisation (Mazzoleni, 2008). Of course, game frames alone are not a sufficient indicator of populism, but when combined with references to ‘the people’ and other contextual characteristics, they are likely to be an indicator of the presence of populist currents. Populism through the media refers to the media amplification of populist voices. Here, media amplify and report populist voices and narratives due to the convergence of goals. That is, media may expect consumption bumps when reporting populist statements, particularly by 4 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

Table 1. Media populism hypotheses.

Hallmarks Hypothesis Populism by media Game frame, tactics, anti-elite Journalism norms bleed into social media; Populism through media Amplification, personalisation Similar populism in media and social media Populism bypassing media Anti-elite, anti-out-group, ‘the Populism to a greater extent people’ on social charismatic or propagandist leaders. In addition, disintermediation, particularly on social media, allows political actors, including populists, and citizens, to circumvent journalistic gatekeepers and communicate directly with the public (Engesser et al., 2017). Consequently, previous assumptions about the influence of professional news media norms and values are no longer certain. Recent research on the role of right-wing websites during the US presidential election indicates that radical and partisan agendas promoted through social media dis- torted the agendas of mainstream news media (Benkler et al., 2017). We may therefore add another kind of relationship here, one of populism bypassing (traditional) media. Esser et al’.s (2017) final type is populism through citizen journalism, which refers to the way newsrooms open up their content for public comment. The focus of this article is on the first three types as the latter refers to citizen communication rather than to how professional communicators hinder or facilitate populism. It follows then that efforts to obtain a complete picture of the media’s role in political communication requires observation of the interrelated media logic of traditional, online and social media (Chadwick et al., 2016; Engesser et al., 2017). Both populism by the media and populism through the media are facilitated by media logics and, in particular, the use of news frames such as conflict frames, strategic frames and personalisation frames over others (Entman, 1993: 51; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Norris et al., 2000; Wasike, 2013). In populism through the media, communicators such as political elites develop frames about an issue and try to establish these in the public discourse and in the news media (Benford and Snow, 2000; Gerhards and Rucht, 1992; Hänggli and Kriesi, 2010). In contrast, populism by the media refers to the sense- making and interpretive packages journalists use to contextualise events by manipulating metaphors, catchphrases and images in order to prioritise some events. See Table 1 for an overview of media populism hypotheses. A number of outcomes are thus possible if actors exploit the new opportunities for the articulation of oppositional politics and the populist mobilisation of oppositional sentiment: (1) the traditional hegemonic norms and values of journalism may be carried over into the new hybrid media system with few adaptations; or (2) there may be a feedback mechanism into traditional media increasing the likelihood of it adopting newer more populist rhetoric; or (3) both may display contrasting populist communicative styles. If populism is there by dint of ‘through the media’ or if populism is bypassing traditional media, we would expect that it is more likely that (2) may prevail and that we will witness greater levels of populist discourse across media as media report and repeat populist claims and exhibit a tendency towards personalised frames (Bennett et al., 2013) Suiter et al. 5 and possibly anti-out-group rhetoric. If, on the other hand, the variety of populism is ‘by the media’ then we should see either (1) or (3) and a focus on conflict or strategic frames, which emphasises tensions between the people and the establishment, thus favouring anti-establishment or anti-elite messaging (Bächler and Hopmann, 2016). More traditional media logic would dictate that strategic game frames, in particular a concentration on opinion polls, would also be contributing factors to the success of populist messaging (Hubé and Truan, 2017; Strömbäck et al., 2017). If, finally, populism is bypassing media then the lack of journalism norms is expected to lead to more populist communication. Combining the insights from previous research, we can hypothesise that more commercial, tabloid and new digital-first media outlets are more likely to exhibit greater degrees of a populist communication style than elite newspapers and public sector broadcasters.

Media and populism in the Republic of Ireland If populism thrives on discontent, the Republic of Ireland would seem ripe for a flourish- ing of populist politics. The Irish party system is in an advanced state of fragmentation (Farrell and Suiter, 2016) with established parties receiving less than 50% of the vote, in contrast to over 90% in the 1980s. Much like Greece, Portugal and Spain, Ireland was badly affected by the 2007 financial crisis and consequent intervention of the IMF and its programme of austerity. In their analysis of recent electoral outcomes in Greece, Portugal and Spain, Hernández and Kriesi (2016a) show how this particularly ‘deep crisis’ accelerated the destabilisation of Western Europe’s party systems, with voters punishing established parties and rewarding the populist parties of the opposition. However, research on populism in Ireland is scarce and media populism even more so. Existing work examines left-wing populism, in particular, anti-elitist tendencies or homogenised anti-politics bias and growing anti-party sentiment (O’Malley and FitzGibbon, 2015; Suiter, 2017). These tendencies accelerated in recent years concen- trating on a narrative of unjust austerity brought about by a corrupt Irish political elite beholden to a cabal of bankers and European Union (EU) and European Central Bank (ECB) officials (Fitzgibbon and Guerra, 2010; Kitching, 2013; McDonnell, 2008). Social crises, most notably in housing, drew popular opposition and the introduction of house- hold water charges gave rise to the largest protest movement since the foundation of the state with protestors framed as a sinister fringe (Power et al., 2016). During this time, independent candidates and small political parties began to portray themselves in a more populist manner (O’Malley and FitzGibbon, 2015) and a few mainstream politicians indulged in anti-immigrant rhetoric (Power et al., 2012). In addition, the senior strategist of the major opposition party Sinn Féin, Eoin O’Broin, published ‘In Defence of Populism’ (McDonnell, 2008: 210). Thus, as O’Malley (2008) argues, Sinn Féin occupies the disaffected space that would normally be occupied by the radical right; in addition, it is now possible that independents may also be fulfilling this function. Furthermore, the space for populist politics of the left may have expanded beyond Sinn Féin with the rise of smaller groups such as AAA-PBP (Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit – renamed Solidarity-People Before Profit in 2017). Ireland is one of four countries which make up the North Atlantic or Liberal media model system (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), with many shared common characteristics in 6 European Journal of Communication 00(0) their media and political systems such as an early development of press freedom and a commercial press, the professionalisation of journalism, fact-based reporting and the objectivity norm (Preston, 2008). In the absence of other confounding factors, these norms ought to limit populist communication. However, as the emergence of UKIP (UK Independence Party), Brexit and Trump has shown, this need not be the case. Thus, the conditions are ripe in Ireland, as elsewhere, for the emergence of populist actors. Most news outlets take a broadly right-of-centre line, although some anti-immigrant othering has been present in the press (Breen et al., 2006) and experienced by, among others, Muslim communities in Ireland (Carr, 2015). With the adoption of digital technologies, Irish media exemplifies the trend towards hybrid media (Chadwick, 2013), whereby traditional news cycles are replaced with more dynamic and highly competitive information cycles. There are early indications that political parties are capitalising on the disintermediating function of Twitter. Most notably, the prime minister announced the elections with a Twitter video rather than a traditional press conference. In addition, research indicates that new and small parties were able to capitalise upon mainstream coverage to expand their party followers on social media (Greene and Ifrim, 2016; Suiter, 2015).

Methodology As a case study of hybrid media and populism, we focus on media coverage of the 2016 Irish General Election. To examine cross-platform media populism in Ireland and to cre- ate a basis for the cross-national comparisons, we coded election news in the 2 weeks prior to the general election on 26 February 2016 (Salgado et al., 2015).. To reflect the diversity of a changing media landscape, a variety of platforms were included: the main nightly news bulletins of one public sector broadcaster (RTE) and two commercial television broadcasters (TV3 and UTV), the online versions of the liberal-pluralist (The Irish Times) and one centre-right broadsheet (Irish Independent), one tabloid (The Star) and one digital only platform (TheJournal.ie) Power et al. (2016: 262). All parties, leaders and groups of independents running for election were included. In addition, from the Twitter API, we collected 151,947 tweets from 422 accounts representing all political parties and independent alliances (10), all candidates with a Twitter account (352) and journalists (60). To ensure the maximum conceptual clarity and to support subsequent comparability across studies, we have as far as possible utilised the conceptualisations and operationali- sations identified in the special issue of Journalism edited by Esser et al. (2012). To determine the source of opinion, if any, we also coded for opinion by journalists, politicians or experts, whether there was overt personalisation of either the party leader or the party, and for the source of information, party leader, other members, experts, media, citizen, polls and facts. In addition, in order to understand whether the characteristics of charismatic leaders played a role, we coded for the characteristics of leaders. We also coded for some binary (yes/no) variables including depiction of the leader, quotation from leader or a direct quotation. In addition, in order to speak of the issue environment, we coded for the main issue and whether there was any mention or refer- ence made to the Eurozone crisis. Finally, to identify if strategic game frames were Suiter et al. 7

Table 2. Dominant journalist frame by platform.

Platform RTE TV3 UTV Irish Times Irish Indep rish The Star The Journal Social Media Game frame 46.88 60.87 47.37 74.37 82.01 83.08 67.48 61.15 Issue frame 53.12 39.13 52.63 25.63 17.99 16.92 32.52 38.8

Pearson’s, chi-square 53.1626 Pr (0.000). important we coded for the presence of a strategy or game fame and, in order to identify the type of populism manifest, if any, we coded for references to ‘the people’; ‘us and them’, out-groups, the elites and the establishment. The coding was carried out by a coder with reliability tests conducted by the main authors. The inter-coder reliability was 0.8 well above the standard minimum (Holsti, 1969). The variable strategic game frame coding frame is based on the Key Concepts study (Aalberg et al., 2012) and includes stories that frame politics as a game, personality study, as strategy and as personal rela- tionships between political actors not related to issue positions. In addition, it covers news stories that focus on the tactics or strategy of political campaigning, how they campaign, on the images of politicians, on political power as a goal in itself and on politicians as individuals rather than as spokespersons for various policies. The same applies for horse race coverage. Coders coded first for which one dominated the coverage. They then specified whether it was public opinion or winning versus losing the majority of the stories were on winning and losing. To the extent that one frame is dominant over another in Irish media, it is the game frame (see Table 2) contributing up to some 73% of all stories across all outlets. Of course, game frames alone are not a sufficient indicator of populism, but when combined with references to ‘the people’ and other contextual characteristics, they are likely to be an indicator of the presence of populist currents. On Twitter, the presence of populist frames was identified via a selection of keywords that reflect terms associated with populist discourse, their variations and common social media abbreviations, and terms specific to the Irish context. These terms include variations of mainstream media, bureaucracy, political class, sovereignty, our country, the people, insiders, revolution, protest, bail-out and bondholders. These are similar to what Waisbord and Amado (2017: 1334) identified as the populist style of communication and which include antagonistic discourse and fixation with the press. During our analysis, the message text from all 151,947 collected tweets was extracted, parsed and indexed. The frequency of occurrence of all selected keywords was then calculated separately for tweets posted by politicians from different parties and for journalists. This allowed us to identify the extent to which various populist frames were prevalent among these distinct groups of users, together with the overall extent of populism present in the entire corpus of tweets.

Findings and discussion Although conclusions from case studies may be culturally specific, we argue that insights about the new boundaries between hybrid media are important explanatory factors regarding the presence of populism in any jurisdiction. 8 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

Populism by the media (H1): Overall the game frame is dominant in Irish media (see Table 2), making up some 73% of all stories across all outlets. There are differences in the propensity to deploy game frames between broadcasters, but these are statistically insignificant. The larger difference is between broadcasters and print and online outlets where game frames are the highest among print and online news outlets. As expected, the tabloid newspaper has the highest level at 83%, but this is statistically indistinguishable from the mid-market broadsheet, Irish Independent, at 82%. The paper of record, The Irish Times, is lower at 74%, but this is still significantly higher than the broadcasters. The newer digital start-up, TheJournal.ie, records the lowest figure at 67%. Turning to social, we gathered the tweets of some 60 political journalists. The most likely to tweet game frame topics was a radio journalist, who did so 113 times at 2.5% of his output. Overall, the game frame was present in about 64% of all game frame stories compared with 36% for an issue frame. The journalists most likely to proffer game frames were in the tabloid and the centre-right mid-market broadsheet, the Irish Independent. To consider game frames in greater depth, we may expect that more populist media might focus on public opinion polls as the will of the people, while others might focus more on the strategy and tactics for winning and losing. Overall, some 61% of stories concentrated on party politics and only 5% on opinion polls. These stories were concentrated in the broadsheet newspapers at 8% in the Irish Independent, almost twice that in The Irish Times while TheJournal.ie came in at 6%. The tabloid, however, was for a lower at only 1.5%, which is more in line with the public broadcaster. The other broadcasters did not use the opinion poll frame at all. Crime, an issue that may be considered particularly populist, was most prominent in the tabloid newspaper (9%) and the commercial broadcasters (4%) followed by the mass-market broadsheet (3%) and the digital native (1.5%). In terms of winning and losing strategies, the patterns are as expected and in line with the overall findings on game frames. The public broadcaster references this some 63% of the time within game frame stories compared with 74% for TV3 and 76% for UTV. The Irish Times is on 51% compared with 65% for The Star. Again, the digital native TheJournal.ie confounds expectations at 42%. The picture is more mixed for strategy and tactics, the commercial broadcasters focus on this to a greater extent than RTE, the PSB and the broadsheets more than the digital native. The exception here is the tables at 39% compared with an average of 56% for the rest. Only 2% of stories refer to any sort of elitism and almost all of these are anti-political elite. In fact, the occurrence of this framing is so low overall that any differences between outlets are statistically insignificant. Regarding populist frames by journalists on Twitter, we found that the instances were relatively low at only around 1% on average for any individual journalists. Thus, it is clear that none of the political journalists mobilised populist frames on Twitter. Even among those who did tweet a populist sentiment the rates were low. On average populist tweets accounted for around just 1% of all of a user’s tweets, ranging from 0.86% among digital natives to 1.1% among journalists working or legacy print opera- tions (see Table 3). The highest rate recorded was 4% for a then legacy print journalist who is now a radio presenter. This confirms what we saw in the media analysis where it seems that populism in Ireland where it exists is more through than by the media. It may be noteworthy journalists more likely to tweet populist frames worked for national UK outlets based in Ireland. Suiter et al. 9

Table 3. Populism among journalists.

Type of user Average per cent of all Average per cent populist tweets of user tweets Broadcast 1.59 0.96 Legacy and digital print 1.1 0.86 Digital native 2.05 1.1

Table 4. Personalisation by platform.

RTE TV3 UTV Irish Tim Irish Ind The Star The Journal Party leader 7.81 8.70 13.16 17.17 26.26 20.00 19.51 Party as whole 78.12 82.61 71.05 24.24 24.10 12.31 25.20 Other 14.06 8.70 15.79 58.59 49.64 67.69 55.28

Pearson, chi-squared (12) = 154.1516, Pr = 0.000.

Populism through media (H2): In general, Irish media tend not to concentrate on the party leader, with an average of 21% of stories doing so. This ranges from 8% on the public-sector broadcaster to13% on the new private broadcaster UTV (see Table 4). Among traditional newspapers and online sources, the elite broadsheet, The Irish Times, exhibits the least emphasis on party leaders at 17%. This is in contrast to 20% for tabloid and online outlet and 26% for the other broadsheet. While the coverage of party leaders is relatively low at 21%, the breakdown of coverage is interesting in terms of which outlets tend towards personalisation and which leaders are more likely to be personalised (see Table 5). Unsurprisingly, Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach or prime minster, receives the plurality of mentions at 51%. However, the next most frequently mentioned leader is Gerry Adams (19%) of Sinn Fein, the only party that can be construed as close to being populist. He is referenced more frequently than the leader of the outgoing junior coalition party (13%) and the leader of the opposition (11%). Coverage of Gerry Adams accounts for 22%, 31%, and 25%, respectively, in the Irish Independent, The Star and TheJournal.ie, which is well out of line with the party’s place in the parliament as, at the time, it held 10% of the seats. Apart from the Sinn Féin leader, references to those leading all other small parties are in single figures. Other arguably populist leaders of much smaller left-wing groupings and independents received almost no coverage at all. The disproportionate number of references may in part reflect a strategic emphasis on personalisation within the party as well as an established pattern of personalisation in the media coverage (see below). On this basis, there appears to be an overlap between the parties’ strategic interest in generating coverage and the media’s interest in generating attention through controversial figures, which diverts from norms applied to other party leaders. In theoretical terms, personalisation is linked to populism both directly and indirectly: Canovan (1999) and Kriesi (2014) posit a direct con- nection, considering it a corollary of populism and its distrust of politics as usual. On the other hand, Esser and Matthes (2013) argue that personalisation focuses on the perfor- mance of leader rather than on political issues and, in this respect, contributing to the thin 10 European Journal of Communication 00(0) 6.60 2.40 1.20 1.20 5.39 30.54 11.38 18.56 12.57 10.18 Avg by media outlet 3.4 2.6 6.6 2.8 4.4 3.0 1.3 0.6 6.1 Social Media: personalisation by party 11.8 4.17 8.35 0.00 4.17 8.33 0.00 4.17 33.33 25.00 12.50 The Journal 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 7.69 38.46 30.77 23.08 The Star 8.38 2.74 2.74 0.00 2.74 27.40 10.96 21.92 10.96 15.07 Irish Ind 9.38 6.34 3.12 0.00 9.38 3.12 6.25 34.38 15.62 12.50 Irish Tim 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 33.33 33.33 11.11 11.11 11.11 UTV 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 TV3 33.33 16.67 16.67 16.67 16.67 0.00 0.00 0.00 20.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 30.00 RTE Party Fine Gael Fianna Fail Sinn Fein Labour SocDems PbF AAA Renua Indep Alliance Green Personalisation. Party leader frame by media outlet. Table 5. Leader Enda Kenny Michael Martin Gerry Adams Joan Burton Donnelly/Murphy/Shorthall Richard Boyd Barrett Paul Murphy Lucinda Creighton Shane Ross Eamon Ryan Suiter et al. 11

Table 6. Game frame tweets by party.

Party Tweets Percentage of party tweets Independents 531 1.617 FG 365 1.654 SF 340 1.522 FF 338 2.123 Labour 260 1.511 Green Party 250 1.75 SocDems 201 1.594 PBP-AAA 122 1.909 Renua 105 2.3 DDI 59 1.576 ideology of populism that tends to gloss over and simplify issues, events and their connec- tions. In this sense, we can consider personalisation as part of a dynamic that ends up enhancing populism: while personalisation has always been an important news value (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) when found alongside indicators of populism may be considered as adding to and contributing to the populist shift. When we examine the extent to which each party grouping engaged in personalisation on social media, we find that Sinn Féin does indeed have the most focus on its leader at 6.6% of all party and candidate tweets from that party, compared with figures from 2.8 to 3.4% for the established parties. In terms of direct mentions of party leaders by individual journalists on Twitter, then Prime Minister Enda Kenny attracts the most at 48.4% of the total compared with 18.4% for Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and 5.1% for the main opposition leader Michal Martin. Thus, while there is concentration on the two main government incumbent party leaders, there was disproportionate focus on Adams, mir- roring the attention from the news outlets themselves. Populism Bypassing Media (H3): We coded all tweets from politicians and party accounts, both challengers and incumbents, from nine parties and independents during the period. This resulted in 151,947 tweets from 422 accounts. However, only 141 users had at least one populist tweet in the period. In total, some 2571 individual tweets were coded as game frame (see Table 6). This meant that they contained the following words or phrases: polls/ahead/behind/winner/loser/loss/red c/mrbi/race/fight/contest/battle/vic- tory/defeat/meltdown. Of all the game frame tweets, we found that independents were the most likely to disseminate these messages at almost 21% of the total and about 1.6% of their overall content (see Table 4). Of course, identifying populist tweets through keywords is not foolproof. However, as Twitter messages were, at the time, limited to 140 characters, the specific selection of words takes on additional significance and, elsewhere, word selection has been used to identify distinct discourses on social media (Schwartz et al., 2013). On this basis, we suggest that the use of select terms, such as ‘the people’, may be taken as a potential indicator of populist messaging. Although isolated references are of little interest, a pronounced pattern or cluster of keywords is a likely indicator of populist tendencies or, as discussed below, game-frame tendencies. A similar 12 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

Table 7. Overall populist tweets by party.

Party Populist tweets Percentage of all populist tweets Independents 795 31.349 SF 468 18.454 PBP-AAA 320 12.618 Green Party 183 7.216 SocDems 159 6.27 DDI 146 5.757 FG 144 5.678 FF 140 5.521 Labour 124 4.89 Renua 57 2.248 approach is taken by Stavrakakis and Katsambekis (2014), who consider ‘the people’ as constituting a nodal point indicating populism, especially when combined with references to out-groups, such as the elites or immigrants. This is further supported by the findings of Waisbord and Amado (2017), who examined tweets of known populist politicians in Latin America. In order to ascertain potential populist tweets, we coded tweets that used the following phrases: mainstream media/msm; Elite/elites; bureaucrat/bureaucracy/bureaucrats; political class; sovereign/sovereignty; our country; the people; the Irish people/common people/working people/people power/ordinary people/real people; insider/insiders; revolution; protest/protests/protester/protesters/protesting and bail out/bailed out/bailout/ bondholder/bondholders. We found some 47 tweets with the term immigrants. However, none of these was negative, so it is not included as a search term. Looking more specifically at populist tweets (see Table 7), we can see that independents accounted for some 31.3% of all tweets indicating populism in the dataset. This strengthens the idea that the presence of independents in the party system may be one factor that mitigates against the arrival of a populist far-right party. The other significant groupings in terms of utilising populist language on Twitter are the left parties, including Sinn Féin and PBP-AAA, accounting for 18.5% and 12.6%, respectively, of all populist tweets. Overall, PBP-AAA party were the most likely to tweet in populist terms at 5% of the party’s overall output with independents at 2.4% and Sinn Féin at 2.1%. The micro Direct Democracy Ireland which did not win any seats came in at close to 4%. All the other parties were closer to 1%. Finally, we turn to the type of populism displayed by each party grouping, displayed in Table 8. We can see that the independents were the most likely to use populist language on Twitter. In fact, we have highlighted the top two contributors to each populist statement in the table and the independents appear in each category. Sinn Féin follows closely behind with a top spot in 6 of the 12 categories and PBP-AAA in 4. In contrast, the establishment parties of Fine Gael and Labour appear in none, the established major opposition party Fianna Fail in only one and the newly established Social Democrats in none. Suiter et al. 13 2.35 4.67 5.06 7.39 11.28 13.23 12.06 26.06 10.89 The Irish people 257 7 7.33 5.73 5.33 8.13 2.4 11.6 20.13 23.33 The people 750 10 6 7.84 9.8 0.98 5.88 4.9 10.78 12.74 11.76 22.55 11.76 Our country 102 2.78 5.56 8.33 2.78 11.11 11.11 41.67 16.67 Sovereign 36 – – 9.09 9.09 9.09 Bureaucracy 11 – – – 45.45 – 27.23 1.82 1.21 1.21 0.61 4.85 13.33 10.91 24.24 26.06 15.76 Bail out 165 0.88 2.16 1.39 3.55 4.57 0.51 5.58 17.13 19.41 44.79 Protest 788 1.81 5.45 3.63 9.69 3.03 0.61 17.58 11.51 27.27 19.39 Revolution 165 5.89 5.89 Insiders 17 17.65 – 11.76 – 47.09 11.76 – – 1.99 2.49 4.48 5.97 1.99 0.99 28.36 14.43 24.38 14.93 Establishment 201 1.75 1.75 1.75 5.26 Elites 57 17.54 17.54 54.39 – – – 3.45 6.89 MSM 29 – – – 41.38 37.93 – – 10.35 Populist keywords by party grouping on social media. Table 8. No tweets FG (%) FF (%) Labour (%) Sinn Féin (%) AAA-PBP (%) Independent (%) SocDems (%) Greens (%) Renua (%) DDI (%) 14 European Journal of Communication 00(0)

Conclusion This article set out to differentiate between the various types of media populism in order to ascertain their relative presence or absence in the Irish political context. This is interesting because Ireland is one of the few European nations with the theoretical ingredients for a far-right populist party where one has not yet gained ground. Following Rogowski (2004), we consider this anomaly as revealing of some of the dynamics of media populism. While scholars have looked at the structure of the political field, scant attention has been paid to the role of the media. In this article, we have examined populism by and through the media as well as populism bypassing the media. We find that in the Irish context, the media may be acting as gatekeepers against populism. It appears that Irish news outlets are holding to traditional conservative lines, particularly on balance and impartiality, which the UK and US press may be moving away from (Seaton, 2016; Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2017). The levels of populist messaging both by and through the media appear to be relatively low. In contrast, smaller populist parties and independents are more inclined towards populist messaging when bypassing the media on Twitter. And it is not just the features of the platform itself which allow it, we find that populist actors are more likely to disseminate populist messaging on Twitter than are journalists, even those who work for tabloid newspapers, which are often thought of as likely populist messengers. It is worth recalling, as Krämer (2014) argues, that media populism is a matter of degree not kind; in other words, it is not binary but rather likely scalar. That is, the struc- tural position of media outlets may yield conditions that enable and thwart populist messaging to varying degrees. Our findings from Ireland support this understanding. Overall, it would seem that in the Irish media system’s, characteristics such as strong professionalisation, neutrality and information-orientation may be acting as bulwarks as indeed may the conservatism of Irish media outlets. On the other hand, the fact that they did not in similar systems in the United States and in the United Kingdom points to the relevance of other factors such as majoritarian election systems or the presence of independents. This will need to be explored in further research.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD Jane Suiter https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2747-8069

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