Investigating Media Populism Worldwide

Abstract

ABSTRACT Growing evidence suggests that news media significantly contribute to disseminating, endorsing, or merely increasing the visibility of populist rhetoric. While a large amount of literature has focused on the type and volume of news coverage provided to populist actors and parties (populism through the media), there is more scarcity of knowledge regarding the media's orientation towards populism (populism by the media), partly due to a lack of systematic comparative evidence. To address this shortfall, we introduce a novel, large-scale comparative dataset, the Media Populism (M-POP) expert survey (including a website and a ShinyApp). This survey provides metrics for media populism across 38 national and subnational contexts globally, thereby offering an empirically grounded evaluation of the primary theoretical interpretations of media populism. In the article, we detail the dataset, evaluate the advantages and drawbacks of using an expert survey method, and conduct a systematic analysis of the determinants of media populism, particularly focusing on its right-wing manifestation, to validate our metrics. We then explore two empirical applications of the M-POP dataset in a comprehensive comparative manner, tackling key questions in political communication literature: the interplay between media populism and tabloid journalism, and the correlation between individual populist sentiments and media populism.