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Newsletter
No. 2, July 2016
Second year achievements
The Cracow meeting, April 2016
(overall report, WG news, workshop)
First Action book
Training School in Bucharest
Report from an STSM visit
The Odense meeting, August 2015
ICA-preconference in Japan, June 2016
2016 ECPR Conference in Prague
Future meetings
Second year achievements
By the second year of COST Action IS1308, we have
achieved a lot. In fact, in the progress review conducted
by the Action Rapporteur it was concluded that: “This
Cost Action has done everything it promised, and is even
a bit ahead of schedule”. In other words, we are making
sufficient progress on the MoU objectives and deliverables.
The key objective of our action is to produce up-to-date
knowledge on mediated political populism via a coordinated,
comparative and comprehensive scientific effort. This
objective is already partially achieved, by the establishment
of this action and our strategic and proven recruitment
of dedicated scholars into our network. Among the first
outputs which help achieve this objective is the review of
existing relevant material and literature, which in year two
has resulted in our first action book. In this book, based
on the effort of 60 dedicated academics, we offer reviews
of current research and discussion of populist political
communication in 24 countries. The three working groups
have also provided a concluding chapter each, which
provide an overview of the current state of affairs related to
the processes of populist political communication including
political actors, media and citizens. We have started to
prepare meetings with stakeholders to disseminate the
insight the book has provided.
In year two of the action we have also come a long way in
defining an agenda and direction for future research. At the
two main events of year two, first in Odense in August of
2015, then in Cracow in April of 2016, we have worked on
research designs and methods to study the shortcomings
identified in the literature. Based on this work, we have
prepared templates for research which will be carried out
in year three. We have however, already made a good start
with integrating new research findings to produce coherent
knowledge and to revitalize research. In this regard, the
input provided by the early stage researcher think tank, in
continuing the work towards a special issue and proposing
a pre-conference at the 2016 ICA meeting http://www.
has been very
valuable. New and interesting research findings were also
presented and discussed at the Action Workshop in
Cracow.
Due to organizational changes in COST, year two was
reduced by two months. This had some implications for
the amount of Short Term Scientific Missions which was
completed in our second year, but we are confident that
most of these missions will be carried out in year three
instead.
Overall report from
the Cracow meeting
The Cracow event on April 7-9, 2016 attracted more
participants than ever. Over three very intense days 60
academics from 27 European countries discussed ongoing
and future research on populist political communication
at the new campus of the Jagiellonian University. Some
of these participants were invited as experts to provide
insight into the specific Polish context, and to discuss how
the governing Law & Justice Party, identified as a populist
party by some Polish scholars, recently had influenced
Polish communication and media structure. In addition
to the regular MC meeting and WG meetings, we also
organized our first Action Workshop. The first part of this
workshop was dedicated to the discussion of design and
methods, which proved to be very useful and constructive
for the later discussions in the working groups. The second
half of the day was spent discussing ongoing research. In