HNDS-R: Populist Rhetoric on Social Media and Its Effects on Democracies

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Political observers and scholars have recently expressed concern about the rise of populist rhetoric on social media, which many consider a threat to democratic stability and peace. This project will document the prevalence of populist rhetoric in social media in democracies globally, and determine how this rhetoric spreads and what are its consequences on the functioning and quality of democracy. It will produce a new massive dataset on the extent of populism in political communication on social media for tens of thousands of candidates and hundreds of parties across about 80 countries. Analyzing these data will allow researchers to understand whether populism is on the rise across the globe, where it is most prevalent, how it spreads, and whether it erodes democracy. The results of the project will contribute to improving our understanding of this potential threat to democratic stability around the world. This project aims to advance our understanding of the spread and consequences of populism in democracies around the world. While it is broadly understood that populism is on the rise globally, there is little available data on the use of populist rhetoric by political elites. We overcome this limitation by building a massive cross-national dataset of all posts from all major democratic parties in the world on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which constitutes the most comprehensive coverage of online elite rhetoric to date. To analyze this data, we extend new methods for multilingual text analysis in order to jointly analyze parties and politicians communicating in dozens of unique languages. Finally, we employ these new methodological developments to address critical questions about not just the prevalence of populist rhetoric, but how it spreads within and across parties, as well as its effects on the public.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.