Transnationalism and Populist Networks in a Digital Era: Canada and the Freedom Convoy

Abstract

s The growth and success of right-wing populist movements globally has been remarkable since the early 2010s. Indeed, populist parties in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America have received tremendous electoral success, shaping a movement for the people and by the people within the political sphere. To what extent do populist movements influence other such programs across national borders? Research has suggested that globalization has facilitated the spread of populist ideology. Transnational populism emphasizes the “people” as a “horizontal, membership-based collective with membership premised on an in/out logic between nations, allowing populist national movements to engage and share a global ideological program. This paper seeks to understand and measure to what extent populism has become a transnational movement and identify how populism moves across national borders through online political participation. To explore this question, we collected over 6.7 million digital trace data on X/Twitter during Canada’s January–February 2022 Freedom Convoy movement. Receiving support from thousands of citizens, the Freedom Convoy revealed the ability of populist ideology to move aimlessly across international borders. We used a deep-learning model applied to text analysis to implement a classification task to measure populist narratives during the movement.