Measuring populist style in visual communication:

The case of Viktor Orbán

Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on the style of populists by focusing on the visual and textual elements of Viktor Orbán’s Facebook communication. Orbán is one of the most prominent figures associated with contemporary populism, and his 14 consecutive years in power make him a unique case for the study of the bimodal populist style. To this end, all his image-based posts (N = 492) were collected over a three-year period (2018-2020), covering campaigns, the COVID-19 crisis, and slow news (‘cucumber’) periods. The results of the quantitative visual and verbal content analyses reveal the primacy of visual content in transmitting populist signals, suggesting that Orbán’s relationship with ‘the elite’ is predominantly positive, contrary to expectations about negative populist communication about elites. Although the results indicate only moderate differences in the use of populist style elements across the three time periods, the findings suggest that visual elements are used in populist communication to convey different messages than textual ones.