Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
New Media and Populism, Sınav Ahmet, Editör, Eğitim Kitabevi, İstanbul, ss.23-41, 2023
Digital Populism: Twitter Usage of the Presidential Candidates
during the 2023 Election in Turkey
The debate over whether populism is an ideology, a
strategy, a discourse, or a style, as well as what defines populism and which
movements or politicians can be described as populist, continues in an ongoing
effort to find a clear answer in the literature. Populism is often considered as
a 'pejorative' term (Kaltwasser, et al., 2017, 3) and a 'vague' concept
(Canovan, 1982, 544). There is no fundamental consensus on the definition of
populism and, according to Ernesto Laclau, both the function attributed to the
concept and the content of the characterization made with the concept without
"questioning" remain unclear. (Laclau, 2007, 15). Engesser et al.
draw attention to the immanent structure of these three terms, where populism
can be understood as ideology and style, noting that populist communication is
understood as "ideology" when focusing on its content, "style"
when focusing on its form, and "strategy" when focusing on its
motives and goals. They show that the logic of populist communication can be
understood by including the actor of populist communication as a fourth
component in these three components (Engesser et al., 2017, 1279).
Understand the logic of populist communication in
today's digital mass politics scene, the way political actors use social media;
with concepts such as digital populism (Barlett et al., 2011; Tai, 2015; Bobba,
2021; Estella, 2021), social media populism (Bobba 2019; Bracciale et al.
2021), populism 2.0 (Gerbaudo 2014), cyber-populism (Gerbaudo 2017) is
attempted to be met. However, there is no consensus on the connection between
social media and populism and the existence or level of this correlation. Even though
the study will include an analysis of social media, the concept of digital
populism has been adopted, which is more widely used in the literature and is
much more comprehensive and holistic in terms of the practices of using digital
tools.
Benjamin Moffitt (2019) proposes a ‘typology of
populist leaders’ level of social media presence’, arguing that populist
leaders' use of social media is not identical and that they exhibit usage
practices in different forms and intensities. The scope of the study is to
understand how the candidates use Twitter and the level of their shares during
the 2023 Presidential Elections of the Republic of Turkey, through the typology
of social media presence levels of populist leaders. To this end, we will first
briefly review how populism is conceptualized, and then present the main
approaches to social media and populism. However, since this study does not
attempt to propose a conceptually "correct" concept of populism, it
will only briefly present the explanations of both populism and its connection
through social media. Using Moffitt's (2019) typology of social media presence
levels, this study aims to understand the Twitter usage practices of the four
candidates in the 2023 presidential election in Turkey and also to question the
validity of this typology.