Boris Kollár and OĽaNO Party Communication on Facebook
Boris Kollár and OĽaNO Party Communication on Facebook

Summary/Abstract: The study analyses communication of populist rhetoric by Slovak populist politicians and populist political parties before the 2019 elections to the European Parliament and then, for comparison, in selected days during non-electoral period in July 2019. The analysis was based on a populism index that measures the complexity or depth of the populist discourse: people-centredness, anti-elitism and exclusion of out-groups. It was found that the main difference between the two political actors was in how they related to out-groups. Comparing two selected periods, it was found that – surprisingly- the intensity of populist rhetoric increased for both entities in the latter period. The theoretical contribution of this paper to methodology of populism index is that 'thin' or 'thick' dimensions of populism, as such, do not reveal subtle, but crucial differences among seemingly identical populist rhetoric.

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