The Populist Political Communication Style in Action: Podemos’s Issues and Functions on Twitter During the 2016 Spanish General Election

Abstract

Populism is a phenomenon that has been acquiring great relevance over recent years in the United States and Europe. Literature on the subject has identified the existence of a populist style that also affects political communication. The aim of this article is to analyze the structure of issues and the functions of messages circulated by a populist party in order to determine the presence and incidence of this style’s main components. The methodology is based on a quantitative analysis of the content of the Twitter profiles of the Spanish political party Podemos and its leader, Pablo Iglesias, during the 2016 Spanish elections. Totally, 2,612 tweets were analyzed. The results allow the identification of a strategy of complementarity, which appears as a new component in the communication style of populism in the digital environment. Podemos is also seen to lean toward antielitism and its leader toward the communicative construction of “the people.”