Abstract
This study explores voters’ populist alternative news use during (different types of) democratic elections and investigates starting points for preventing potentially harmful effects. We draw from two combined data sets of web-tracking and survey data which were collected during the 2017 German Bundestag campaign (1523 participants) and the 2019 European Parliamentary election campaign in Germany (1009 participants). Results indicate that while populist alternative news outlets drew more interest during the first-order election campaign, they reached only 16.5% of users even then. Moreover, most users visited their websites rather seldom. Nonetheless, our data suggest that alternative news exposure is strongly linked to voting for (right-wing) populist parties. Regarding the origins of exposure, our analyses punctuate the role of platforms in referring users to populist alternative news. About 40% of website visits originated from Facebook alone in both data sets and another third of visits from search engines. This raises questions about algorithmic accountability.
Highlights
This study explores voters’ populist alternative news use during democratic elections and investigates starting points for preventing potentially harmful effects
Looking at the temporal distribution of populist alternative news use (RQ1a), our findings suggest that the overall level of interest in the outlets under consideration was higher in the fore-run to the election than immediately afterwards
Results indicate that during the 2017 German federal election campaign, voters of right-wing populist AfD had a higher likelihood of being exposed to populist alternative news and visited respective websites more frequently
Summary
This study explores voters’ populist alternative news use during (different types of) democratic elections and investigates starting points for preventing potentially harmful effects. To reflect that not all types of alternative news are natural allies to political populism (see, for example, Downey and Fenton, 2003; Downing, 2003), we follow previous research which calls this specific group of outlets “populist alternative” news media (Boberg et al, 2020; Frischlich et al, 2020; Holt and Haller, 2017; Müller and Schulz, 2021)
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