Political Communication in the Age of New Media - Investigating the Reception of Right-Wing Populist Communication Strategies in the Japanese Blog Scene

The rise of populist politicians has significantly influenced political communication and public discourse around the world. In the light of the ongoing mediatization of politics, populist politicians have been found to manage new media as alternative platforms for political communication particularly effectively. Since the beginning of the 21st century Japan, too, is facing an increasing number of right-wing populists on the regional and national political level. To investigate right-wing populist communication strategies and their reception in Japan, this presentation introduces a mixed-method approach with a focus on blogs. While existing studies mainly focus on the “sender site” of populist political strategies, the dissertation project focuses on their reception in the public sphere.

The study combines quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the reception of right-wing populist communication in the Japanese blog scene using the digital analysis tool TopicExplorer. Besides introducing this tool, the presentation will show how digital methods such as topic modeling can be used to determine relevant discourses and narratives in a Japanese blog corpus regarding the topic of migration. Furthermore, it will introduce the application of a content analysis of selected blog entries based on a review of literature on right-wing populism to identify strategies and narratives used by right-wing populist politicians in Japan as well as to analyze their reception in the blog scene.

Katharina Dalko is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Political Science and Japanese Studies at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. She is analyzing populist communication strategies and narratives as well as their influence in the Japanese new media by applying digital methods such as text mining and topic modeling to large blog corpora. She is currently receiving a PhD scholarship at the German Institute for Japanese Studies.