Populist communication and extremist narratives as strategic messaging: A comparative analysis of Nordic political parties on Facebook

This study extends the communicative approach to populism – widely used in research on populist communication – to the analysis of extremist narratives, enabling a differentiated examination of populism and extremism as two related but distinct phenomena that are often conflated in academic and public discourse. We distinguish analytically between populist communication (people-centrism, anti-elitism, out-group exclusion) and right-wing extremist narratives that reject liberal-democratic EU values, and we investigate how the use of populist communication and extremist narratives varied across countries and parties and to what extent their prevalence overlapped. Our manual coding comprises 2,700 Facebook posts by political parties and politicians in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden during the 2024 European Parliament election campaign. Findings show that populist communication was present across the political spectrum, with notably higher levels in Sweden, while extremist narratives were rare and largely confined to right-wing fringe actors. These results challenge the notion of a uniform “Nordic pattern” and suggest a contagion effect in Sweden, where radical-right rhetoric appears to influence mainstream discourse. By operationalising both strategies within a shared analytical framework, this study provides a promising way of measuring and comparing populist and extremist messaging in digital campaign environments in a nuanced way.