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Newsletter
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No. 2, July 2016
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this section, a total of 11 papers were presented, many
authored by early career investigators. We are very grateful
for all the hard work the local organizers
Agnieszka Stępińska
and Agnieszka Hess
had put into preparing and running this
event. We all felt extremely welcome.
News from the
Working Groups
Working Group 1
WG1 on Political Actors as Populist Communicators
made excellent progress on the detailed codebook for all
countries as well as collecting feedback on the collection
of material and the coding instrument. This codebook in
large parts adapted from the codebook developed by Sven
Engesser, Frank Esser and Sina Blassnig. The general
idea is to be able to compare the political actors strategies
with their presence in the media, analysed by WG2. The
content analysis will include Facebook-posts and Tweets
from the official and national party accounts of all parties
in the country that have an official Facebook- and Twitter-
account and official national press releases from all parties
in the country. The Cracow meeting Post-Cracow, the
work on coordinating the content analyses and the set up
for the coder training will be a top priority and the Prague
meeting will be an important meeting to begin the concrete
research. Some members of the WG1 aim to conduct a
qualitative interview research; meeting actors to better
understand their strategies.
Working Group 2
WG2 on The Media and Populism made excellent progress
on the detailed codebook for all countries as well as
collecting feedback on the collection of material and the
coding instrument. The next step will be a meeting with
Jesper about a potential WG1/WG2 cooperation and about
potential solutions to the feasibility problems raised. We
are confident to work out an arrangement that will make
Prague an even more productive meeting. We will keep you
updated!
Working Group 3
WG3, Citizens and Populism, has spent the second year of
the Action preparing a cross-country experiment. Following
up on a brainstorm session in Odense, the WG split up into
three task forces that designed a survey as well as stimuli,
collected a list of country characteristics that could be used
as contextual data in the analysis of the experimental data,
and contacted survey companies for offers. An additional
task force
looked at the success of populist parties across
Europe and linked that to several variables indicating a
country’s economic situation. In Cracow we had a very
productive meeting in which we discussed the input of
the task forces, and decided to move on with the data
collection. Moreover, many of the countries participating
in the COST action have indicated their willingness to take
part in the experiment, even those that are not member
of WG3. The summer of 2016 will be used to conduct
pilot studies in two countries, and translate the survey
experiment, after which the experiment will field by the end
of the year.
Summary from presentations
at the Cracow workshop
Best practice in comparative research
In this plenary presentation, Frank Esser discussed
the opportunities and challenges of comparative
communication research. He started off by explicating the
foundations and basic logic of comparative research as well
as its key scientific goals. With regard to practical research
steps, he discussed the relevance of country selection,
5th COST meeting at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, April 2016
Jörg Matthes illustrates the design of the experiment