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Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Restricted Thesis: Campus only access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Leadership Studies

First Advisor

Dr. Bo Yun Park

Abstract

Populism has experienced a significant global resurgence in the last 20 years. In light of this, recent scholarship has focused on the so-called “elective affinity” between populism and social media, exploring how it has manifested in various political contexts. This study aims to determine how adherence to the populist style influences the relationship between visual media use and engagement with posts on X (formerly Twitter) authored by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the three months leading up to the 2024 US Presidential Election. Drawing on content and engagement data collected via the X API and scored using supervised machine learning for textual content and a multimodal large language model for visual media, I argue that increased adherence to the populist style strengthens the positive association between visual media use and engagement. Negative binomial regression models show that increased adherence to the populist style is associated with a strengthened association between visual media use and engagement for Trump and a weakened one for Harris. Use of the populist style was also associated with heightened engagement for Harris and decreased engagement for Trump in text-only posts. These results support a framework for understanding populism as a thin-centered communication style and contribute a new theoretical foundation from which future studies of populism and social media can be based.

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