Shermeen Shahzad
Research Mentor: Pavani Vissapragada
Mentor Department: Health Policy and Management, Public Health
Author(s): Shermeen Shahzad, Praneetha Vissapragada
Session: Session 7 (4:00 PM – 4:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 135
Abstract
Current research on populist politicians is focused on the actions they take once they rise to power; however, a missing element is how their environmental context favors that political tactic, especially with the influence of social media. Pulling from populist and democratization literature, this study identifies the contextual factors that lead politicians to take up populist strategies for elections. This study first reviews posts made by politicians and their team on their official Facebook account in 2018 across the United States and codes each post for populist rhetoric, defined as anti-pluralist, anti-establishment, anti-institution, and/or pro-personalization of power. We then compare these scores to factors such as incumbency, rurality/urbanity, or district partisan lean. A preliminary analysis of this relationship suggests an increased use of populist rhetoric in terms of severity and frequency in historically red states compared to swing states. This paper adds to the current body of populist studies by investigating why and how populist approaches to elections are successful, a currently unexplored question in political science. This study also introduces a new methodology of coding populism based on rhetoric and its leveraging of Facebook data that holds great potential for further studies on similar topics.
