Susanne Kopf

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

This book provides a concise yet comprehensive guide to Wikipedia for researchers and students of linguistics, discourse and communication studies, redressing the gap in research on Wikipedia in these fields and encouraging scholars to explore Wikipedia further as a platform and a medium. Drawing on Herring's situational and medium factors, as well as related developments in (critical) discourse studies, the author studies the online encyclopaedia both theoretically and empirically, examining its origins, production and consumption before turning to a discussion of its societal significance and function(s). This book will be of interest to Wikipedia scholars from a range of disciplines, as well as those with a broader interest in linguistics, discourse studies and the digital humanities.