Outlet Political Alignment, Ownership, and Context: Configurational Associations of Populist Discourse on X in European Mainstream Media

Populist-discourse markers are no longer confined to the communication of political actors; they also appear in mainstream media content. Yet it remains unclear how outlet characteristics, national contexts, and issue environments combine to shape this variation on social media platforms. The study examines configurational variation in populist-discourse markers among mainstream-media posts on X. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we analyse 106 public posts published in 2023 and 2024 by 35 outlets coded to nine European institutional locations. The purposive sample includes 40 identity-construction posts, 36 anti-elitism posts, and 30 anti-establishment posts. The analysis assesses configurations of outlet political alignment, ownership and commercial pressure, national polarization, economic conditions, issue attributes, and event conflict. Outlet political alignment captures the relationship between an outlet’s public editorial orientation and recognizable political divisions, informed by political-parallelism theory. Salient issue attributes recur across the configurations associated with identity construction and constitute the only condition above the conventional necessity threshold for that outcome. Anti-elitism and anti-establishment discourse are associated with multiple asymmetric configurations. Ownership and commercial pressure appear in conjunction with other organizational, national, and issue conditions, rather than as independent requirements. X provides a common platform setting in which institutionally diverse outlets may use comparable engagement-oriented communicative forms while retaining different political alignments.