A carregar...
Projeto de investigação
Sem título
Financiador
Autores
Publicações
Estratégias de comunicação populista dos partidos políticos portugueses num contexto mediático híbrido durante as eleições de 2019
Publication . Teles, Alda Maria de Magalhães; Barreto, Ana Margarida; Rosa, Jorge Martins
Combining multidisciplinary research in political communication, strategic communication, political science, and mediatization theories, this research project aimed at two major outcomes: a better understanding of strategic online political communication in Portugal; and an assessment of the level of penetration of populist
discourse in Portuguese politics, within the context of a hybrid media sphere. This thesis studies political communication strategies on social media, with a special interest in describing the effects of the hybridization of the media system on the populist communication logic. More specifically, the main purpose of this research was to understand the pervasiveness of populist communication in the Portuguese political sphere which in
turn operates in a hybrid media landscape. It looks for the presence of populist features in social media communication and in the strategies used in Facebook by the ten political parties that gained parliamentary representation following the October 2019 elections. This main research topic is addressed through four research questions: 1) To what extent has populism, as a communication phenomenon, penetrated the discourse of political parties and to what degree permeates their communicative strategies? 2) Can we find
evidence of the “populist zeitgeist” suggested by Mudde (2004) on the Facebook posts of the political parties? 3) To what extent are social media used to mobilize support for populism? 4) How do populist communication elements propagate in a hybrid mediated sphere? As argued in this thesis, the existing literature regarding populist communication in Portugal does not sufficiently approach populist communication mechanisms and
strategies with operational frameworks, nor is populist communication studied along the whole political spectrum, even if describing specific aspects and specific political parties. The 2019 Portuguese electoral year provides a fertile ground to study the use of social media by political actors. It was a year with two electoral processes, at the European and national levels, where major and minor parties deployed their communications in a hypermedia and hybrid logic, with digital platforms reaching their full strategic potential. It was also the year that saw the first political party self-assumed as ‘anti-system’, and labeled as populist in expert surveys, enter the Portuguese parliament. Although research on political communication – and populist communication – in Portugal has been increasing, most studies focus on right-wing populism and concentrate their analysis on the radical-right Chega party’s behavior. Also, research is lacking on describing how Portuguese parties’ communication and campaign professionals use social media in their approach to strategic campaign communication. In view of these two major limitations in Portuguese research, the studies in this thesis combine insights from in-depth interviews with quantitative analysis of social media data. Following the
scholar line of conceptualization of populism as a type of political communication, this dissertation builds methodologically on netnography and content analysis of the rhetoric of Portuguese political parties, and on recent conceptual frameworks as mediatization 2.0 and social media logic applied to populist communication.
This research finds that populism as a communication style can be used by different political actors albeit in different degrees and that populist communication flourishes in a hybrid mediated sphere. The main findings suggest that populist discourse is spread across the left-right spectrum, although with a more pronounced presence in the extremes, and the ‘zeitgeist hypothesis’ (Mudde, 2004), that emerges from the notion
that populist parties can be found across the whole spectrum, was rejected. Regarding the use of online opportunity structures to mobilize support for populist communication, social media seem to be well-suited to display populist elements, namely people-centrism and anti-elitism. Finally, the analysis of populist communication could not ignore the hybrid media landscape where political actors, media actors and
citizens produce, share, comment, and reframe information, and I argue that the new hybrid communication environment favors populist rhetoric. As pointed by De Vreese et al. (2018, p. 45), “the communicative tools used for spreading populist ideas are just as central as the populist ideas themselves”. This goes with a combination of populist rhetoric and a strategic use of communication tools, taking advantage of the system’s
hybridity.The present work also contributes with the first Populism Dictionary applied to the Portuguese political context, as well as theoretical and methodological apports to populist communication research.
Unidades organizacionais
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Contribuidores
Financiadores
Entidade financiadora
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
Programa de financiamento
OE
Número da atribuição
2021.05945.BD