The study “What is populism anyway? Newspaper representations of populism in Spain and Italy between emptiness and political partisanship” by Carlo Berti, Arantxa Capdevila, and Carlota M. Moragas-Fernández, all from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, looked at the journalistic construction of populism within the polarized pluralist media system in South Europe.
There are debates about what populism is, in fact, with claims that it is either a thin-centred ideology, a political signifier, or simply a communication style. Nevertheless, several political parties have been identified as populist, both from the Left and the Right.
While academics debate, the research on how news media uses the concept of populism remains scarce – and this study is one to address this scarcity. Some recent research indicates that journalists tend to identify the Far Right as populist, but this research has focused on media in the liberal and democratic corporatist models of journalism, as per the classification by Hallin and Mancini (2004) that is prevalent in Northern Europe and the US.
Little research has been conducted on the polarized pluralist media prevalent in Southern Europe. This study analyzes the use of the concept of populism in Spain and Italy, both of which are in the polarized pluralist model and also that have populist forces not belonging to the Far Right.
There were four research questions, straight from the study: “RQ1: How is populism constructed and used in the news media in two countries belonging to the polarized pluralist model of journalism? RQ2: Are there major differences in the construction of populism in news media with different editorial lines and political orientations?
RQ3: Is there a degree of politicization of the concept of populism in a journalistic model characterized by weak professionalization and high political parallelism?
RQ4: What are the similarities and differences between the use of the concept of populism in the polarized pluralist model, and in other models of journalism?”
To answer these questions, the authors analyzed the media coverage of two recent national elections, in November 2019 in Spain and September 2022 in Italy. From each country, a sample of three newspapers was chosen. The Spanish newspapers were El País (liberal and centre-left), elDiario.es (left-wing, progressive), and La Razón (right-wing, conservative). From Italy, Il Corriere della Sera (liberal, centre), Il Fatto Quotidiano (close to the ideas of the Five Star Movement), and Il Giornale (right-wing, conservative).
Next, all articles containing the root populis* in the original languages and all the variations were downloaded. The authors focused on sentences, not entire articles, and the final sample had 455 articles (253 for Spain, 202 for Italy) and 588 units of analysis.
Negative connotations of populism were common, consistent with previous studies such as Bale et al., 2011; Hatakka and Herkman, 2022; Thornborrow et al., 2021. Positive connotations were rare. However, there were a number of instances which were neither positive nor negative. This, according to the authors should be considered together with the finding that populism lacks a link to a particular political orientation.
Thus, with populism not being linked to specific parties, the concept remains “empty” or “vague”. However, when a political orientation is linked to populism, the link is mainly to the Right, but the right-wing newspapers La Razón and Il Giornale associate it with the left or equally with both.
The defining features of the use of populism then are the emptiness and political partisanship. It is not always with a specific content, and often appears as a generic and vague term. It appears often as a “floating signifier” (De Cleen et al., 2018)., but is often, but not exclusively, linked to the far right.
In conclusion, the combination of vagueness and negativity to the concept of populism. The partisan media uses the concept to attack political opponents, with the negative connotation so strong that countering the claim often takes the form of attacking the definition rather than trying to define the concept positively. The use of empty label has consequences, as the media has framing power.
The article “What is populism anyway? Newspaper representations of populism in Spain and Italy between emptiness and political partisanship” by Carlo Berti, Arantxa Capdevila, and Carlota M. Moragas-Fernández is in Journalism. (free abstract).
Picture: bird’s-eye view of sitting on bench while discussion by Marco Oriolesi
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