Darius, P., Drews, W., Neumeier, A., & Riedl, J. (2026). Radical populist parties receive greater audience support on social media: a cross-platform monitoring of digital campaigning for the 2024 European Parliament election. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-08773-w
Summary
This study offers one of the first large-scale, cross-platform analyses of digital campaigning during the 2024 European Parliament election, tracking 401 parties across all 27 EU member states on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter, and YouTube. Drawing on roughly 283,000 posts, the authors ask whether populist radical right (PRR) parties are both more active and more successful in generating audience support, operationalized as likes. Their central finding is that PRR parties enjoy only modest advantages in posting activity but pronounced advantages in audience engagement — most dramatically on TikTok — and that far-left populist parties employing similar anti-elitist and emotional rhetoric also receive elevated support. The paper contributes to the normalisation-versus-equalisation debate, suggesting newer platforms like TikTok act as equalizers favoring challenger and radical populist actors.
Key Contributions
- Most comprehensive cross-platform (five platforms), cross-national (27 states, 401 parties) analysis of party digital campaigning to date, extending prior evidence to TikTok and YouTube.
- Introduces and publicly releases the EUDigiParty dataset of party social media handles and party-level metrics.
- Robust three-lens operationalization of the PRR family — EP group affiliation, EU&I expert-coded issue positions, and POPPA populist traits — to triangulate findings and reduce misclassification.
- Cross-European evidence that emotional/anti-elitist communicative styles and Eurosceptic positions are systematically rewarded by platform engagement dynamics.
Methods
The authors compiled the EUDigiParty dataset of 401 parties contesting the 2024 EP election, identifying main national accounts across five platforms and collecting ~283,000 posts via platform APIs and CrowdTangle (with TikTok supplemented by web scraping), over 10 March–9 June 2024. They modeled two count-based dependent variables — party activity (number of posts) and party support (number of likes) — using separate truncated negative binomial regressions per platform, controlling for European region and newcomer status. Parallel models across EP groups, EU&I issue positions, and POPPA populist traits provided triangulation and robustness checks.
Findings
- Activity differences were limited: mainly Patriots for Europe (PfE) parties posted more (Facebook +215%, TikTok +258%, YouTube +217%); most PRR groups did not differ from the EPP baseline.
- Support advantages were large and consistent: PfE received vastly more likes than EPP (Facebook +858%, Instagram +662%, TikTok +3121%, YouTube +2458%, X/Twitter +335%); ESN and ECR also showed strong gains.
- TikTok was the most asymmetric arena — PfE received on average over thirty times more TikTok likes than the EPP.
- Far-left parties (“The Left”) also outperformed centrists on Instagram (+224%), TikTok (+322%), and YouTube (+485%).
- More Eurosceptic positions were associated with higher support on TikTok, X/Twitter, and YouTube.
- Expert-rated emotional appeals boosted support on Facebook and X/Twitter; anti-elitist rhetoric boosted support on TikTok, X/Twitter, and YouTube.
- Because support advantages exceed what activity differences explain, PRR messages appear to resonate and drive engagement rather than simply being posted more often.
Connections
This paper speaks directly to platform-specific studies of digital campaigning and TikTok, connecting to work on visual and short-video campaign communication such as Achmann-Denkler2026-lx and to the broader Coordinated Sharing / party-messaging tradition represented by Giglietto2023-fa71a001 and Giglietto2024-cbeb3f70. Its emphasis on emotional and anti-elitist rhetoric being algorithmically rewarded resonates with research on affective and moralized content amplification like Brady2026-ln and on populist communicative style in Gerbaudo2026-fo, while its normalisation-versus-equalisation framing links to Larsson2026-ro.
Podcast
A research-radio episode discusses this paper: 🎧 MP3 · Spotify