Populism in the Mass Media across Europe

The mass media constitute the decisive link between politics and citizens. In that function they spread messages from populist politics or themselves can cover political issues in a populist manner. This paper assesses populism in mass media contents during the 2009 European Parliament election campaign. It seeks to identify the varying degrees of how populism appears in the media and with which actors and issues it is associated. In an innovative step it then makes attempts to explain the occurrence of populism in mass media contents. Explanatory factors include country level aspects as well as features of the different medium types, thereby contributing to a multi-level understanding of media(ted) populism. The study draws on data collected during the campaign in all EU member states in newspaper and television news coverage in the two weeks preceding the elections. The occurrence of populism is coded by use of multiple items. Results stem from HLM regression models on basis of media content and extra media data.