TWO FACES of TWITTER POPULISM in THE NETHERLANDS (summary, viz and data)

(this is a summary of my Dutch articles about twitter populism in the Netherlands)

Twitter is an interesting tool for politicians: it creates possibilities for direct communication with the public. Journalists as intermediary between voters and politicians become obsolete. The American president Trump is using this tool to create government based on populism: surpassing the parliament in decision making or putting pressure on the parliament through direct public support.  In Netherlands two right-wing members of the house of representatives are following this successful communication using Twitter.

Two Faces
I have downloaded and analyzed the tweets of these tow politicians: Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV(freedom party) and Thierry Baudet (forum for democracy). The outcome of this research is that both are right-wing populists. The content of their tweets shows that populism has two faces: a blue collar version(Wilders) and a more intellectual version(Baudet). While Wilders tweets express an open xenophobia; Baudet tweets focus on sovereignty, anti-EU arguments are used to wrap up xenophobia in immigration.

Here is a scatterdiagram showing the tweets of Wilders and Baudet, together with the tweets of leader of the socialists(Asscher and the Greens(Klaver)

(click to enlarge)


Explanation: The position of the documents with tweets of the four politicians are the red circles. The horizontal line is the x dimension, explaining 49% of the variations. I define this dimension as: from xenophobia to identity. The Y axis, explaining 37%, is from cooperation to sovereignty. The beginning and end of both axis are the red squares. These positions can be confirmed by the world clouds

Below you find a link to my data uploaded in Voyant, so you can inspect the data. Click top right to export or choose an other visualisation; click down left to choose a document.