Populism in Europe: CasaPound

Abstract

This paper is the fifth in a series of country briefing papers released in 2012 about the online support of populist political parties and street-based groups in Europe. These papers are based on a dataset of approximately 10,667 Facebook supporters of these ‘nationalist populist’ parties in 11 European countries, which was published in the Demos report The New Face of Digital Populism, released in November 2011.1 Further papers will be released throughout 2012. Throughout this paper, we refer to two primary datasets by the following terminology: · CasaPound Facebook supporters: The primary data source used in this report is a survey of 423 Facebook supporters of CasaPound Italia, collected by Demos during July and August 2011. All references to CasaPound supporters refer to this group unless otherwise stated. CasaPound officially changed its name to ‘CasaPound Italia’ in 2008, but for the purposes of this report we will refer to the movement as ‘CasaPound’. · Populist parties and movements (PPAMs): In order to draw comparisons between CasaPound Facebook supporters and the Facebook supporters of nationalist populist parties elsewhere in Europe, throughout this paper we refer to the data set collected for The New Face of Digital Populism. This includes 10,667 Facebook supporters of nationalist populist parties and movements in 11 Western European countries. We refer to these as PPAMs throughout.