On mainstream parties’ professionalized use of populist communication on social networking sites: an analysis of party Facebook contents in Taiwan’s 2020 national election

Abstract Despite the fruitful research on populist communication patterns of fringe parties on social network sites, mainstream parties’ communicative behaviors have often been ignored. From a perspective of political campaign, this study argues that mainstream parties could professionalize their use of populist frameworks as the campaign strategy on social network sites. The professionalization of populist communication is defined as a) mainstream parties’ deliberate selections to stylistic devices to present certain affects in political campaign and b) mainstream parties’ increasing use of populist frameworks with an increasing online user engagement. With a focus on the Taiwan’s 2020 national election, a dataset composed of Facebook posts of parliamentary parties (N total = 3,315) is analyzed. Our findings indicate that mainstream parties per se tend to adopt more moderate populist frameworks on Facebook. While stylistic devices are positively associated with populist communication, mainstream parties tend to present populist frameworks in negative and emotional styles. While online user engagement is partially associated with populist communication, higher online engagement does not intensify mainstream parties’ degrees of using populist frameworks on Facebook.