Abstract
Populism is often seen as a tactic, strategy and method of campaigning in political communication that exploits political discourse. Populism plays a vital role in Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election. Various research has been carried out to understand the practice of populism. However, few have explained the way social media and online news in populist communication practices relate to the discourse of the online presidential campaign. This research aims to understand the pattern of the use of populist discourse in Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election in online news and social media. The study employed Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that focuses on social identity construction and the relation of populist discourse practices. Data for the study were obtained from online news from January 15 to February 14, 2019. A total of 81 news articles from online news and 576,782 entries that are disseminated in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube were analyzed by using Nvivo and web crawlers. This research finds that, first, political discourse and populist discourse are amplified by online news coverage and extended in the social media; second, online news does not engage in producing populist discourse but echoes the populist discourse by citing politician’s populist utterance. In conclusion, populist keywords and concepts like infrastructure, food, energy, and radical become a hegemonic discourse in Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election. There are two important contributions of this study on populist discourse in Indonesia’s 2019 election campaign. One, the knowledge of the pattern of the distribution of populist discourse. Two, the understanding about the use of populist discourse in social media and online news.
Highlights
Populism is a contemporary phenomenon which is present in various forms in politics
Through an exploration of the distribution of texts and discourse, we found the ideology of nationalism and new developmentalism, power relations, and populist discourse that are dominant in the 2019 presidential election
This section discusses how populist discourse in Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election through online news and social media is distributed in social media and online news
Summary
Populism is a contemporary phenomenon which is present in various forms in politics. Populism can be interpreted as tactics, strategies, and methods in political communication (Moffitt & Tormey, 2014; Waisbord & Amado, 2017). Populism can be seen as an ideology that follows an antagonistic frame of three elements. They are the people, the elite and the general will (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). It refers to the national community, which is defined as citizenship or in ethnic terms (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). It is defined on the basis of power, including the majority of people who hold “leading positions in politics, economics, the media, and art” “general will” refers to "common sense." The purpose of “general will” is to “combine different demands and to identify common enemies” (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017, p. 16)
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