VIPoP – The Visual Politics of Populism, an ambitious research project funded under PRIN 2022 with a grant of €217,940, has recently come to a close. Over the course of twenty-nine months, the project investigated, from a comparative perspective, the visual communication strategies adopted by political parties in Europe. The project was led as Principal Investigator by Professor Mattia Zulianello, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Trieste. He coordinated a consortium of three research units, which also included the University of Milan and the University of Milano-Bicocca.

VIPoP represents the first systematic comparative analysis of visual populism in Europe and stands out for its deeply innovative approach, opening a new frontier in the field. For the first time, the ideational approach to populism was systematically extended to the visual dimension, which has so far remained largely marginal in the international literature. The project looks at political parties as genuine political brands, and at their symbols — logos, colour palettes and recurring visual codes — as identity markers governed by marketing logics not unlike those shaping competition among companies in the marketplace. From this perspective, VIPoP adopted a multi-platform research design, integrating thousands of data points from Facebook and Instagram and an advanced methodology combining computer vision, automated text analysis, qualitative interviews with party elites and randomised conjoint experiments.

“What struck us while working in the field was the level of awareness with which party communication teams manage every visual detail, much like a marketing department would handle its own brand identity. The interviews clearly showed that the choice of a colour, the framing of an image or the position of a logo are never random, but the result of a precise strategy. Reconstructing this visual grammar from a comparative European perspective was one of the most revealing aspects of the project,” Zulianello explains.

The relevance of VIPoP lies on a distinctly European scale. At a historical moment in which the populist challenge raises crucial questions about the resilience of the continent’s liberal democracies, the project provides essential analytical and interpretative tools for understanding how these political actors build consensus through images.

“Today, images are the primary vector of digital political communication: understanding their populist mechanisms is not an academic exercise, but a prerequisite for democratic citizenship. VIPoP therefore responds to Goal 16 of the 2030 Agenda — peace, justice and strong institutions — by providing tools to defend the quality of public debate and the resilience of European democracies,” Zulianello underlines.

Professor Zulianello’s scientific output within VIPoP has been particularly extensive and has appeared in top-tier international journals. Among the project’s most significant results is PopulisTree, a systematic mapping of European populist parties from 1979 to the present day, accompanied by openly accessible datasets covering national and European elections. Developed by Professor Zulianello and presented in an article published in European Union Politics, PopulisTree forms the classificatory backbone of the entire project and is intended as a reference tool for the international scientific community, as well as an open resource for anyone wishing to study the phenomenon with methodological rigour.

Other publications by Professor Zulianello connected to the project include a state-of-the-art review of populist visual communication in Political Studies Review, co-authored with Francesco Melito, a research fellow recruited within the framework of VIPoP; a study on the logos of populist radical right parties as elements of brand identity in The International Journal of Press/Politics, co-authored with Luigi Curini and Benjamin Moffitt; an analysis of perceptions of the mainstreaming of the populist radical right in South European Society and Politics, co-authored with Antonella Seddone; and the article “Show, Don’t Tell”, published in Political Studies in 2026 and also co-authored with Melito, which emerged directly from fieldwork interviews with the communication teams of Italy’s main political parties.

These contributions are accompanied by two books co-authored with Petra Guasti: Capire il Populismo, published by UTET in 2024, and Understanding Populism, forthcoming with Karolinum Press / University of Chicago Press.