This book adopts a multi-method multimodal approach to the study of online political communication, applying it to case studies from the UK, France, and Italy toward offering a portrait of the rapid ideological shifts in contemporary Western democracies. The volume introduces an integrated framework combining Sentiment and Emotion Analysis, rooted in lexical semantics, and the qualitative dimensions of Appraisal Theory, applying it to large corpora of online political communication from the UK, France, and Italy. Combei and Reggi highlight their combined potential in analyzing the multimodal resources in such discourses and in turn, revealing fresh insights into layers of subtext and the ways in which parties and movements frame their political programmes and values. The authors also take into account culture- and language-specific variables across the three countries in shaping such discourses. The volume makes the case for an integrated methodological framework that can be uniquely applied to better understand the multimodal communicative landscape of divisiveness in today’s rapidly shifting political climate and other forms of online communication more broadly. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in digital communication, political communication, multimodality, and qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis, especially those interested in corpus-assisted approaches.

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.