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Stijn van Kessel
Stijn
van Kessel
Remco Castelein
Remco
Castelein
Shifting the blame. Populist politicians’ use of Twitter as a tool of opposition
Loughborough University
2016
Populism
Political parties
Netherlands
Twitter
Content analysis
Political Science not elsewhere classified
2016-03-18 10:27:50
Journal contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Shifting_the_blame_Populist_politicians_use_of_Twitter_as_a_tool_of_opposition/9469646
The advent of new social media has facilitated new means of political communication, through which politicians
can address the electorate in an unmediated way. This article concentrates on political actors challenging the
establishment, for whom new media platforms such as Twitter provide new tools to engage in a ‘permanent
campaign’ against dominant mainstream parties. Such opposition is ostensibly articulated most strongly by
populist parties, which can be seen as the ultimate challengers to the (political) ‘elites’. By means of two oftenidentified
cases of populism in the Netherlands (the radical right Freedom Party and left-wing Socialist Party),
this study explores how populist party leaders use Twitter messages (tweets) to give form to their adversarial
rhetoric in practice. Irrespective of the different ways in which the politicians utilised the medium, our study
shows that Twitter can serve as a valuable source to study the oppositional discourse of populist parties, and
(shifting) party strategies more generally.