CORONAVIRUS AND SCIENCE-RELATED COMMUNICATION BY POPULIST PARTIES

The relation between science and populism has already been investigated by relevant sociopolitical literature. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has produced remarkable changes in how politics, science, and society relate to each other. Therefore, there is a need to explore further what science is to populists and how populist parties have dealt with science in times of pandemic. How much has science-related communication by populist parties changed after the outbreak of Coronavirus? What topics have populist science-related messages been about? Are there differences in the science-related communication of ideologically different populist parties, and between populist parties in government and in opposition? The research tries to answer these questions through a thematic analysis of populist communication on Twitter. The empirical investigation is carried out through topic modelling on a dataset of 1.133 science-related populist tweets. The focus is on a pertinent single case study, Italy. Here there are three different populist parties in terms of ideology, which have been both in government and in opposition during the pandemic. Findings highlight that different populist parties have resorted to different science-related rhetoric and that the two Italian populist parties on the radical right, the League and FdI, have engaged in “counter-science” and “anti-science” communication.