Radical populist parties receive greater audience support on social media: a cross-platform analysis of digital campaigning for the 2024 European Parliament election

Philipp Darius, Wiebke Drews, Andreas Neumeier and Jasmin Riedl
Additional contact information
Philipp Darius: Hertie School

No 42vfx_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Social media platforms play an increasingly important role in political campaigning, enabling parties to bypass traditional media and mobilize support directly. While prior research highlights the online prominence of far-right and radical populist actors, most studies are limited to single platforms or national contexts. This study presents the first cross- platform and cross-national analysis of digital campaign communication by 401 parties across all 27 EU member states during the 2024 Euro- pean Parliament election. Using data from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter, and YouTube, we examine party activity and audience engage- ment. By linking digital trace data with expert surveys, we test whether populist radical right parties disproportionately succeed in raising engage- ment online. Our findings confirm strong platform-specific advantages of radical populist parties, particularly on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. We also observe high engagement for far-left populist parties with similar emotional and anti-elitist communication strategies. The more Eurosceptic positions a party holds, or the more frequently experts describe them to use emotional appeals or anti-elitist communication, the more audience engagement they received across several platforms. Overall the findings emphasize a disproportionate online support for radical populist parties across the European Union.

Date: 2025-11-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/69247b08b8168ca2f7b54e7f/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:42vfx_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/42vfx_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().