Populism, Political Personalization and the Attention of Leading Print Media to Foreign Leaders in the G20

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Anton P. Kazun

PhD in Sociology, Senior Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development, Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Economics, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

e-mail: kazun.anton@gmail.com
Anastasia D. Kazun

PhD in Sociology, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

e-mail: adkazun@hse.ru

Section: Foreign Journalism

This article analyzes the influence of populism on the attention of the leading print media of G20 countries to political leaders. Using the Factiva database, the authors collected information on the number of mentions of G20 countries and their leaders in the five leading print media of each G20 country in 2018 and supplemented it with information from the Populists in Power Around the World database. In addition, the mentions of the leaders are compared with the mentions of their countries. The authors show that populist leaders attract more attention from the international press. Also, in the focus are leaders of the countries with a personalized form of government, which suggests a high concentration of attention on the head of state. Populism combined with a personalized form of government reinforces this effect. This conclusion corresponds to previous research into the growth of political personalization: the international media pay more heed to the activities and statements of political leaders rather than to economic developments.

Keywords: G20, global news flow, populism, media, international news, political personalization
DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.5.2020.7797

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