*Angry Posts Mobilize: Emotional Communication and Online Mobilization
in the Facebook Pages of Western European Right-Wing Populist Leaders**
*
Paolo Gerbaudo
Ciro Clemente De Falco
Giulia Giorgi
Silvia Keeling
Antonia Murolo
Federica Nunziata
https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231163
*Abstract**
*
The rise of right-wing populists in Western Europe has often been linked
to their ability to exploit social media affordances to fuel anger.
While scholarship has already examined the emotional dimension of the
populist right’s online communication, with some researchers studying
specifically the fuelling of anger among social media users, we still
lack empirical proof of the mobilizational effectiveness of what we
describe as “anger-triggering communication.” To explore this question,
in this article, we develop a statistical and topic analysis of
right-wing populists’ Facebook pages in Italy, France, Spain, and
Germany during the 2019 European Union (EU) election campaign. We find
that (a) right-wing populists on Facebook have a significantly higher
number of “Angry” Facebook reactions per post compared to their
political adversaries; (b) there is a positive and significant effect of
the number of Angry reactions on the number of times a post is shared;
(c) Angry reactions and Shares are overrepresented in posts on
immigration and security, but anger-fuelled mobilization is not limited
to these topics. These findings contribute to the scholarship on social
media, emotional communication, and populism, adding insights on the
mobilizational effectiveness of negative campaigning. The article
highlights that stoking public anger, especially around controversial
issues such as immigration and security, is a rewarding tactic because
it increases motivational strength, and contributes to triggering
high-threshold interactions such as sharing, which, in turn, are key for
achieving virality in the diffusion of political messages.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051231163327
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