Dimensions, speakers, and targets: Basic patterns in European media reporting on populism

This chapter first explains the theoretical and methodological background for a content analysis of news coverage across 12 countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Switzerland, United Kingdom) and two years (2016 and 2017). It provides information about the main elements of the content analysis (people-centrism, anti-elitism, sovereignty, and exclusion) and explains sampling strategies, codebook, operationalization and reliability. In addition, it gives descriptive results for the coverage investigated. For example, the chapter shows that 60 percent of all analyzed 'commentaries' and 40 percent of all analyzed 'news items on immigration' contain at least one populist key message. Across both story types (commentaries and immigration-related news items), the most salient dimension of populist communication is anti-elitism, followed by people-centrism and exclusion, while sovereignty is the least common dimension. While populism in some countries is clearly dominated by anti-elitism (Poland, Greece, Israel, and Germany), a second group of countries score moderately high on two or more dimensions (e.g., Switzerland, France), and other countries show a rather low occurrence of all four dimensions (e.g., Norway).