Pandemic Populism? How Covid-19 Triggered Populist Facebook User Comments in Germany and Austria

Daniel Thiele

doi:10.17645/pag.v10i1.4712

Abstract

Covid-19 and the government measures taken to combat the pandemic have fueled populist protests in Germany and Austria. Social media played a key role in the emergence of these protests. This study argues that the topic of Covid-19 has triggered populist user comments on Facebook pages of German and Austrian mass media. Drawing on media psychology, this article theorizes populist comments as an expression of “reactance,” sparked by repeated “fear appeals” in posts about Covid-19. Several hypotheses are derived from this claim and tested on a dataset of N = 25,121 Facebook posts, posted between January 2020 and May 2021 on nine pages of German and Austrian mass media, and 1.4 million corresponding user comments. To measure content-based variables automatically, this study develops, validates, and applies dictionaries. The study finds that the topic of Covid-19 did trigger populist user comments and that this effect grew over time. Surprisingly, neither the stringency of government measures nor mentions of elitist actors were found to have the expected amplifying effect. The study discusses the findings against the background of governing the ongoing crisis and worrisome developments in the online public sphere.

Highlights

In the course of the Covid‐19 crisis, the government mea‐ sures taken to combat the pandemic have been increas‐ ingly met with protests in several European countries
Hypothesis 1 posited that posts about Covid‐19 would attract more populist comments than other posts, which is supported by the positive, significant coeffi‐ cient for “Covid” in both models
This article set out to study a problematic form of cit‐ izen engagement in the context of the Covid‐19 cri‐ sis: populist commenting on news reports on Facebook

Summary

Introduction

In the course of the Covid‐19 crisis, the government mea‐ sures taken to combat the pandemic have been increas‐ ingly met with protests in several European countries. In Germany and Austria, these protests by “coronascep‐ tics” have been visible as large‐scale demon‐ strations and on social media. Initial research has linked these protests to populist ideology, highlighting that both populists and coronasceptics deeply distrust elites and reject restrictions of “the people’s” will (Brubaker, 2021; Eberl et al, 2021; Nachtwey et al, 2020). Other scholars have stressed that there is no uniform response of populists to Covid‐19 (Wondreys & Mudde, 2020), empirical studies remain scarce. This study focuses on populist responses of ordi‐ nary citizens to Covid‐19 on social media.

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