Unpacking populist communication in the 2020 Taiwan election: Content analysis and corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of Facebook posts by Taiwanese presidential candidates and party leaders

Despite growing interest in Taiwan’s populism, significant gaps remain in the literature on the communication mechanisms and internal structure of online populist messaging in election campaigns, specifically concerning inter-party differences, agenda-setting effects, and the discursive construction of populist concepts. To address these significant gaps, this thesis examines populist messaging in Taiwanese political parties’ Facebook campaigns during the 2020 election using a mixed-methods approach on a dataset of 1,361 Facebook posts from seven presidential candidates and party leaders. Quantitative content analysis reveals that populist messages constituted nearly half of all campaign posts, underscoring their central role in the election. The analysis further uncovers a moderate correlation between populist content and style, with ‘emotionality’ linked to all content dimensions and ‘negativity’ tied to ‘anti-elitism’. These patterns were strategically deployed to shape campaign topics: the green coalition (pro-Taiwan independence) focused on (anti-)China-related issues, while the blue coalition (pro cross-strait engagement) and third force (minor parties outside the blue-green) prioritised livelihood issues. A subsequent corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis unpacks the construction of ‘the people/elite/excluded others’. The study reveals a structured partisan polarisation, where blue-green and third forces are mutually exclusive. It reveals that left-wing parties frame ‘the people’ through progressive values, whereas right-wing parties align ‘the people’ with governing experience. This rivalry extends beyond politics, influencing the discursive exclusion of non-political groups, such as journalists and businessmen. By innovating a populist theoretical framework and methodology, this thesis has significant implications and breakthroughs for both theory and practice in the areas of political communication, populism, and Taiwan studies.