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Populism has captured the world's attention, especially during election campaigns where the starkness of populist messages comes into sharper focus. While most research focuses either on the content that actors communicate or their delivery of that content, I situate my research among the few studies that do both. I refer to this combination as a communication strategy. I evaluate two research questions: how is the populist communication strategy used and how do the communication strategies of populist and non-populist actors differ? To assess these questions, I collect original data during five national elections that occurred between 2018 and 2019: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Spain (N = 1,577). I measure different elements of communication strategies, including both content and style, in the Tweets of national-level candidates. I find stark differences in communication styles in both what actors talk about and how they convey their messages. This finding suggests that how actors convey their ideas is critical to advancing our understanding of actors' overall communication strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How political actors convey information–that is, the discursive frames they use–can alter individuals' attitudes, preferences, and behaviors, especially during campaigns. Although scholars have shown that discursive frames using populist rhetoric evoke particularly strong reactions, we do not yet know how the individual elements that make up the populist frame, like anti-elitism or pro-people, fare relative to other ways of seeing the political world or what kinds of messages engage individuals beyond populist ones. In this paper, I evaluate the effectiveness of thirteen frame elements in stimulating online engagement. I derive frame elements not only from populism, but from competing discursive frames, including technocracy, pluralism, and neutral rhetoric. I find support for my argument that frame elements using populist rhetoric, are less cognitively demanding, and evoke emotions produce observable framing effects. To test my argument, I evaluate campaign Tweets from 18 actors in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Italy, and Spain (N = 1,577). My findings affirm the existence of framing effects in campaigns while identifying the generalizable content of the messages that produce these framing effects, as well as identifying the type of message content that most effectively competes with populist frame elements in this sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]