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Newsletter • No. 2, July 2016
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confirmed the connection between populist attitudes
and negative attitudes toward the media. But this cross-
sectional and explorative study is not able to explain the
causal direction of the relation, so that more research is
needed to understand populist attitudes. Among the same
line, Ondřej Cἰsař and Václav Štětka presented their study
on “Dissatisfied citizens? Searching for determinants
of electoral support for populist parties in the Czech
Republic”. They’ve showed that there are three roads to
political populism in the Czech Republic: illegitimacy,
political dissatisfaction and alienation from politics. To
conclude this panel, Christian Schemer presented his
team methodological paper on “validation of a populist
attitudes measure for public opinion surveys”, providing
evidence of construct and convergent validity of a second-
order model of populist attitudes that is made up of three
subdimensions: anti-establishment attitudes, demand for
unrestricted sovereignity of the people, and the belief in
the homogeneity of the people. They also demonstrated
that populist attitudes are best conceived as a multi-
dimensional construct.
First Action book:
Populist Political
Communication in Europe
Editors: Toril Aalberg,
Frank Esser,
Carsten Reinemann,
Jesper Strömbäck &
Claes de Vreese
The first book produced by this
action will be published in the
summer of 2016 as part of the
series Routledge Research
in Communication Studies .
Working with this book has
helped us advance conceptual
clarity in research on populist
communication (our Action’s
second objective). Despite a great variety of definitions
and definitional criteria in the literature on populism,
we conclude that there seem to be a growing consensus
that the communicative construction of “the people”
should be regarded as the key component of populist
messages, with anti-elitism and anti-outgroup stances
serving as additional elements. An important contribution
is therefore not only that we develop coherent definitions
and theoretical conceptualizations of the structures
and dynamics of populist political communication in
Europe, but also that we have started to provide state
of the art knowledge and understanding of the patterns
and mechanisms of populist political communication
in European societies. There is however, tremendous
variation in the type and nature of populist actors, as well
as the role of the media. The preliminary evidence does
suggest however, that media often are critical towards
populist actors out of concern for democracy, but that
populist actors per se do not seem to suffer from negative
news coverage. One of the important contributions for
academics is that the book clearly identifies current gaps in
the research literature, perhaps particularly related to the
effects of populist messages on citizens’ attitudes.
COST Training School
in Bucharest
“Disentangling populism: Reception and effects
of populist communication”
Credit photo:
On May 8-12, 2017, the Training School on “Disentangling
populism: Reception and effects of populist
communication” will be organized in Bucharest (Romania)
by the National University of Political and Administrative
Studies. As a part of the COST Action IS1308 Populist
Political Communication in Europe, this Training School
seeks to further advance theoretical and methodological
knowledge in the field of populism research, particularly
with respect to reception and effects of populism
communication.
The Training School comprises 5-day long lectures and a
workshop combined, which will give the participants the
opportunity to attend talks on different topics relevant
to populism research and to take part in an intensive
workshop. Renowned scholars will deliver lectures
on topics related to the conceptualization of populist
communication, populism and the media, effects of populist
communication.
The School targets mainly young researchers across
Europe (PhD students, post-docs, Early Stage
Researchers), interested in intensive training in populist-
related topics and research methodologies.
First Action book