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Mojca Pajnik, Nejc Berzelak & Ajda Šulc (2023) Aligning populist worldviews of citizens to media preferences: peculiarities of an illiberal political context, East European Politics, 39:3, 554-573

Abstract

In this article we look at how people’s relations to the media shape their anti-establishment, people-centrist and exclusionist populist worldviews. We propose to establish the relation between the media and populist attitudes by measuring media consumption with citizen’s attitudes towards a democracy-related function of the media, and we postulate that research should consider the peculiarities of political situations. The results of a representative public opinion survey in Slovenia confirmed a relation between tabloid media consumption, negative media attitudes and populist worldviews – however, with differences according to specific dimensions of populism, reflecting characteristics of an illiberal political landscape in the country.

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The Illiberalism Studies Program studies the different faces of illiberal politics and thought in today’s world, taking into account the diversity of their cultural context, their intellectual genealogy, the sociology of their popular support, and their implications on the international scene.