How do populists visually represent “the people”? While the literature on populism has tended to focus on text- and language-based documents, such as speeches, policies, and party documents to consider how populists characterize “the people,” in this article I undertake a systematic visual content analysis to consider how populist leaders on either side of the ideological spectrum visually represent “the people” in images from their official Instagram accounts (N = 432). Comparing the cases of Donald Trump on the populist right and Bernie Sanders on the populist left, I code for the majority gender, race, and age of “the people” in each image, and supplement this with a discussion of the depictions of these categories. I find that Trump’s images of “the people” are significantly more homogenous across all categories—specifically more white, more masculine, and with less young people—than Sanders’, and situate these findings in the context of the literature on the differences between left and right populism. This article contributes to the study of populist communication by highlighting the role of images in representing “the people”; analyzing how left and right populists do this differently; and developing a method for measuring the demographic characteristics of “the people” in populists’ images that can be used in future studies. In doing so, it seeks to push the literature forward by highlighting that images are not something “extra” to be studied in populist communication, but rather are a central battleground for the construction of populist identities.

中文翻译：

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民粹主义者如何在视觉上代表“人民”？唐纳德特朗普和伯尼桑德斯 Instagram 帐户的系统比较视觉内容分析

民粹主义者如何在视觉上代表“人民”？虽然关于民粹主义的文献倾向于关注基于文本和语言的文件，例如演讲、政策和党的文件，以考虑民粹主义者如何描述“人民”，但在本文中，我进行了系统的视觉内容分析，以考虑如何意识形态谱系任何一方的民粹主义领导人在他们的官方 Instagram 账户（N = 432)。比较民粹主义右翼的唐纳德·特朗普和左翼民粹主义的伯尼·桑德斯的案例，我在每张图像中对“人民”的多数性别、种族和年龄进行了编码，并通过讨论这些类别的描述来补充这一点. 我发现特朗普的“人民”形象在所有类别中都明显更加同质化——特别是比桑德斯更白人、更男性化、年轻人更少——并将这些发现置于关于左派之间差异的文献背景中和右翼民粹主义。本文通过强调图像在代表“人民”中的作用，为民粹主义传播的研究做出了贡献；分析左翼和右翼民粹主义者如何以不同的方式做到这一点；并开发一种测量民粹主义者形象中“人民”人口特征的方法，可用于未来的研究。在这样做的过程中，它试图通过强调图像不是民粹主义传播中需要研究的“额外”东西，而是构建民粹主义身份的中心战场来推动文学的发展。