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ABSTRACT
The study analyses communication of populist rhetoric by Slovak populist politicians and populist political parties before the 2019 elections to the European Parliament and then, for comparison, in selected days during non-electoral period in July 2019. The analysis was based on a populism index that measures the complexity or depth of the populist discourse: people-centredness, anti-elitism and exclusion of out-groups. It was found that the main difference between the two political actors was in how they related to out-groups. Comparing two selected periods, it was found that - surprisingly- the intensity of populist rhetoric increased for both entities in the latter period. The theoretical contribution of this paper to methodology of populism index is that 'thin' or 'thick' dimensions of populism, as such, do not reveal subtle, but crucial differences among seemingly identical populist rhetoric.
Key words: Sme rodina, OĽANO, Populism, Slovakia, Kollár, Matovič, Facebook, Elections, European Parliament
Introduction
This study analyses Facebook communication of a populist political leader, Boris Kollár, chairperson of political party Sme rodina - Boris Kollár (We are a Family - Boris Kollár, or WAF-BK)2 and the official Facebook website of similar partially populist movement Obyčajní ľudia a nezávislé osobnosti (OĽaNO) - Ordinary People and Independent Personalities.
First, we used selection criteria based on selected political science indicators. In other words, we selected political parties/movements or their leaders based on their closeness to populist rhetoric according to prevailing academic and nonacademic consensus and a lack of standard ideological orientation (discussed below). Moreover, both parties are present in the national parliament and both parties ran for the European Parliament in 2019 elections (but only OĽaNO is present in the European Parliament - EP for 2019-2024 term).
Second, selection criteria were based on social media usage. In other words, we selected particular Facebook pages based on public availability of their profiles. While Kollár s Facebook website was much more popular (126,000) than that of his party (83,000), in case of OĽaNO there was an opposite situation: Matovič's Facebook was much less popular (42,000) than that of his movement (117,000) in 2019. Therefore, we analysed posts from Kollár's Facebook page and posts from OĽaNO Facebook webpage.
The selection of these two political entities shows that both are "nonstandard" political parties/movements. WAF-BK actually...