When Articulating Populist Dichotomies Is Paramount: Exploring the Effects of Explicit and Implicit Populist Styles on User Engagement in Turkish Election Tweets

This paper analyzes whether articulated populist dichotomies or fractured populist styles attract more user engagement on social media focusing on the 2023 Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections via Twitter, considering the tweets of individual candidates and parties ( n = 4,139). Negative binomial regressions revealed that the explicit populist style, which articulates “the people” and “the harmful others” in the same message unit, predicts user engagement. The study shows that explicit populism triggers more favorites, retweets, and replies than any other populist style. Although implicit people-centrism has positive associations with retweets and replies, implicit antagonism has no effect on user engagement data.