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Newsletter

No. 2, July 2016

Second year achievements

The Cracow meeting, April 2016

(overall report, WG news, workshop)

First Action book

Training School in Bucharest

Report from an STSM visit

The Odense meeting, August 2015

ICA-preconference in Japan, June 2016

2016 ECPR Conference in Prague

Future meetings

Second year achievements

By the second year of COST Action IS1308, we have

achieved a lot. In fact, in the progress review conducted

by the Action Rapporteur it was concluded that: “This

Cost Action has done everything it promised, and is even

a bit ahead of schedule”. In other words, we are making

sufficient progress on the MoU objectives and deliverables.

The key objective of our action is to

produce up-to-date

knowledge on mediated political populism via a coordinated,

comparative and comprehensive scientific effort.

This

objective is already partially achieved, by the establishment

of this action and our strategic and proven recruitment

of dedicated scholars into our network. Among the first

outputs which help achieve this objective is the review of

existing relevant material and literature, which in year two

has resulted in our first action book. In this book, based

on the effort of 60 dedicated academics, we offer reviews

of current research and discussion of populist political

communication in 24 countries. The three working groups

have also provided a concluding chapter each, which

provide an overview of the current state of affairs related to

the processes of populist political communication including

political actors, media and citizens. We have started to

prepare meetings with stakeholders to disseminate the

insight the book has provided.

In year two of the action we have also come a long way in

defining an agenda and direction for future research. At the

two main events of year two, first in Odense in August of

2015, then in Cracow in April of 2016, we have worked on

research designs and methods to study the shortcomings

identified in the literature. Based on this work, we have

prepared templates for research which will be carried out

in year three. We have however, already made a good start

with integrating new research findings to produce coherent

knowledge and to revitalize research. In this regard, the

input provided by the early stage researcher think tank, in

continuing the work towards a special issue and proposing

a pre-conference at the 2016 ICA meeting

http://www.

icahdq.org/conf/2016/PopulismCFP.asp ,

has been very

valuable. New and interesting research findings were also

presented and discussed at the Action Workshop in

Cracow.

Due to organizational changes in COST, year two was

reduced by two months. This had some implications for

the amount of Short Term Scientific Missions which was

completed in our second year, but we are confident that

most of these missions will be carried out in year three

instead.

Overall report from

the Cracow meeting

The Cracow event on April 7-9, 2016 attracted more

participants than ever. Over three very intense days 60

academics from 27 European countries discussed ongoing

and future research on populist political communication

at the new campus of the Jagiellonian University. Some

of these participants were invited as experts to provide

insight into the specific Polish context, and to discuss how

the governing Law & Justice Party, identified as a populist

party by some Polish scholars, recently had influenced

Polish communication and media structure. In addition

to the regular MC meeting and WG meetings, we also

organized our first Action Workshop. The first part of this

workshop was dedicated to the discussion of design and

methods, which proved to be very useful and constructive

for the later discussions in the working groups. The second

half of the day was spent discussing ongoing research. In