Populism in the Hour of Terrorism : A Study on Populist Discourse on Social Media Following a Terrorist Attack

The aim of this paper is to examine the way political parties use populist discourse on social media following a terrorist attack. I analyze what type of populist language is used, and which parties use it, with a theoretical framework of Jagers and Walgrave (2007) and Magin et al. (2024). This is done by studying the 2017 terrorist attack in Sweden as a selected case. All statements regarding the terrorist attack made by a Swedish Member of Parliament on Facebook in the week following the attack are coded into a dataset and the mean value for each party are compared. The main findings are that it is not the beforehand populist-coded party (the Sweden Democrats) that uses the most amount of populist language. It is, however, this party that uses the most anti-elite and exclusion as populist communications. I also argue that terrorism should be seen as a populist issue, meaning statements on this topic contain, on average, more populist characteristics than non-populist issues do. This study is made with a small sample size and I encourage others to recreate this study in i) a bigger scale and ii) other political contexts.