Stuck in a Nativist Spiral: Content, Selection, and Effects of Right-Wing Populists’ Communication on Facebook

“In the context of political sympathies, explicit processing occurs when followers process political messages systematically (Chaiken, 1987; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), which requires them to reflect upon the messages, remember them, and form attitudes and behaviors in response 306 Raffael Heiss and…”

“…with right-wing attitudes are especially inclined to seek exposure to partisan content (Iyengar, Hahn, Krosnick, & Walker, 2008), which can catalyze a process in which individuals strengthen their initial predispositions by accumulating evidence to confirm their views (Taber & Lodge, 2006).”

“In such cases, negative binomial regressions are suggested (Hilbe, 2011).”

“%) and recall (81%), which indicated sufficient consistency between the automated and independent human-detected codes (Grimmer & Stewart, 2013).”

“Jagers and Walgrave (2007) have defined empty populism as occurring when politicians make references to “the people,” so to speak, which is “a standard communication technique to reach out to the constituency” (p. 323).”

“On the one hand, followers of populist actors may heavily rely on social media for their political 318 Raffael Heiss and Jörg Matthes information (Engesser et al., 2017) and may selectively expose themselves more strongly to attitude-congruent information (Hameleers et al., 2017; Stroud, 2010).”

“Thus, individuals with strong anti-immigrant attitudes may selectively seek out RWP content on social media (Stroud, 2008), and such selective exposure may increase their initial attitudes as they engage in attitude-congruent information processing that reconfirms those same attitudes (Taber & Lodge, 2006).”

“Research on the behavioral effects of anger and fear independent of populist communication has shown that anger drives heuristic decision making in accordance with existing attitudes (Valentino et al., 2011).”

“information (Engesser et al., 2017) and may selectively expose themselves more strongly to attitude-congruent information (Hameleers et al.”

“As a consequence, the in-group may consider itself to be threatened, which can prompt the discrimination of groups perceived to be threatening (Branscombe & Wann, 1994).”

“To code the textual content of posts, we used a dictionary approach, which involved detecting anti-elitist words in the Facebook posts with reference to a dictionary developed by Rooduijn and Pauwels (2011).”

“In fact, individuals with high levels of anxiety may actively seek political information that lowers their anxiety (Huddy et al., 2007; MacKuen et al., 2010).”

“However, to elucidate RWP communication in Europe and beyond, more multi-country studies are needed (e.g., Ernst et al., 2017), especially ones that compensate for those limitations by, for example, involving cross-national surveys in non-electoral periods and the use of new computerized means to…”

“…that (a) politicians in Austria’s government do not care about what people like me think; (b) politicians in Austria’s government talk too much and act too little; and (c) politicians in Austria’s government make decisions that harm ordinary people (Hameleers et al., 2017; Schulz et al., 2017).”

“Even though election periods are ripe for studying media and campaign effects (Iyengar & Simon, 2000), they are not representative of citizens’ daily information environment, for they typically entail the increased spending of political parties on advertising and political posts on social media.”

“To graphically depict the effects, we plotted predicted probabilities with 95% confidence intervals (CI) while setting all covariates to their mean values (see Fox & Hong, 2009).”

“On the other, measuring empty populism is not only conceptually challenging (Krämer, 2017) but also especially complicated in automated content analysis (Rooduijn & Pauwels, 2011, p.”

“…political psychology has shown that citizens prefer attitude-consistent versus attitude-challenging political information (Stroud, 2008; Marquart, Matthes, & Rapp, 2016), particularly if they have polarized political attitudes (Stroud, 2010) or strong right-wing ideologies (Iyengar et al., 2008).”

“RWP actors strategically channel citizens’ negative emotions and redirect their anger and anxiety toward political elites and immigrants, whom they blame for the allegedly miserable situation of native citizens (Hameleers et al., 2016).”

“In that process, RWP actors not only appeal to and channel citizens’ negative emotions but also strategically fuel and disseminate feelings of anger and fear (Fieschi & Heywood, 2004; Hameleers et al., 2016).”

“However, to elucidate RWP communication in Europe and beyond, more multi-country studies are needed (e.g., Ernst et al., 2017), especially ones that compensate for those limitations by, for example, involving cross-national surveys in non-electoral periods and the use of new computerized means to track individuals’ fo…”

“Of course, social media users are liable to encounter political posts in their newsfeeds even if they do not seek them out (Knoll et al., 2018).”

“In that sense, conflictive RWP communication stimulates anger by attributing blame to the political elite and social outgroups (Wirz, 2018).”

“, 2017) and the stimulation of perceived threats (Stier et al., 2017).”

“, 2017) and may selectively expose themselves more strongly to attitude-congruent information (Hameleers et al., 2017; Stroud, 2010).”

“In doing so, their communication can breed political distrust, xenophobic attitudes, and social polarization in general (e.g., Heiss&Matthes, 2017;Müller et al., 2017; Stier, Posch, Bleier, & Strohmaier, 2017).”

“Moreover, other aspects not measured in our content analysis (e.g., empty populism and emotionalization)may have affected the outcomes thatwemeasured aswell as other dimensions of populist attitudes (see Wirz et al., 2018).”

“…following similar approaches (Stroud, 2008, 2010), we used self-reported measures of selective exposure to RWP communication on Facebook; however, such reports rely on individuals’ memories and may be over- or underestimated (Heiss & Matthes, 2017; Naab, Karnowski, & Schlütz, 2019; Scharkow, 2019).”

“…they may use their campaigns to stimulate perceived threats by portraying immigration as an uncontrollable phenomenon (e.g., so-called “mass immigration”) and associating it with physical violence, cultural infiltration, and economic deprivation (Schmuck & Matthes, 2015; Stier et al., 2017).”

“Consequently, individuals with strong political predispositions for RWP stances may be especially likely to engage with RWP actors on social media (Heiss & Matthes, 2017).”

“…processing occurs when followers process political messages systematically (Chaiken, 1987; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), which requires them to reflect upon the messages, remember them, and form attitudes and behaviors in response 306 Raffael Heiss and Jörg Matthes to them (Sotirovic & McLeod, 2004).”

“…2019); analyzed the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and selective exposure to populist radical right content on Facebook (Heiss & Matthes, 2019) and association between the anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook promoted by Alternative for Germany and increase in violent crimes…”

“These results, according to the authors suggest the strategic value and importance of social media channels for rightwing populists in both spreading messages and increasing electoral support for them (HeIss & Matthes, 2019).”