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The media and Northern European Populists: a novel approach to measuring media responsiveness to Sinn Féın using LLMs

Research concerning left-populism has paled in comparison to its right-equivalent, even more so when discussing electorally successful Northern European left-populists, which is to the detriment of our broader understanding of populism in its ideological and geographical varieties. In this paper, we propose an approach to studying Northern European left-populists’ reception in the media landscape - often deemed critical for wider populist party fortunes - when they enjoy moderate to high levels of success. This approach is grounded in theories which largely center around the notion of media responsiveness to so-called “outsider politicians”. The case study used to explore the topic in this paper concerns that of the Irish political party Sinn Féin, largely defined by it’s republicanism and left-populism, from 2020 to 2024, encompassing a period in which the party polled at varying levels of success, through a quantitative analysis utilizing polling data and media sentiment from a variety of novel print and online publications, annotated with Large Language Models (LLMs). Results show that whilst there is no relationship between opinion-poll standing on subsequent media sentiment towards left-populists, there does appear to be an effect on the basis of publication type. These findings contribute to the existing literature on left-populist media coverage, and owing to limitations outlined in this paper there are avenues for further research on this topic.

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Recommended citation: McClenaghan, J. (2025). “The media and Northern European Populists: a novel approach to measuring media responsiveness to Sinn Féın using LLMs”, Journal 1 1(1), pp. 1 - 30.