Media Populism in Macedonia: Right-wing Neopopulist Discourse on the Migration Crisis

The emergence of populism in the public sphere that mediates between parties and their voters is still largely unaddressed. In the case of right-wing neopopulism, the exclusion of immigrants from the idea of ‘the people’ is even more prominent in ethnocentric Eastern European countries with little tradition in multiculturalism and questionable record in the practice of liberal democracy. Hostility towards migration is the scope through which media right-wing neopopulism is measured in a case study of Macedonia, a country representative of Eastern Europe, recently finding itself in global headlines for its role in the migrant crisis on the Balkans. Through quantitative content analysis on articles from three Macedonian pro-government right-wing news outlets (n=307), this study shows a clear change in tone in coverage of migration, marked by an increase of populism over time. Furthermore, it makes a novel distinction between traditional and online outlets, demonstrating that new media have a significantly stronger populist tendency. Finally, it analyzes the relationship between partisan bias and populism, through the operationalization of the concept of incivility as a proxy. The ordinary least squares regression model confirmed that incivility, as an indicator of partisanship, is a significant predictor of populism.