“None of Us Is an Island”: Toward the Conception of Positive Populism Through the Analysis of Pope Francis’s Twitter Communication

Abstract

In this article, we construct a concept of positive populism in which some negative elements of classical populism are missing, modified, and even replaced by positive counterparts. As an empirical test, we used mixed-methods analysis on 1,057 tweets of Pope Francis to ask whether a very popular religious influencer’s rhetoric on social media could be understood as a manifestation of positive populism. We found that the pontiff’s populism is confined to simple and appealing rhetoric, emotionalization, and some other aspects of populism, but his rhetoric is also different because his communication style goes without enmity and division remains on an abstract level. Our analysis shows that the main features of his communication style are its comprehensibility, emotionally positive nature, and characteristically imperative mood, and that it includes some level of a unifying integrative nature.