Digital platforms have become central infrastructures of contemporary populism, shaping how actors communicate, mobilise supporters and contest democratic norms. This article offers a systematic, cross-disciplinary review of empirical research on digital populism published between 2015 and early 2025. Analysing 188 studies from political communication, media studies and political science, we map how platform affordances structure populist communication, how digital populism is conceptualised and how it is studied. The literature portrays digital populism as the communicative enactment of populist ideology in environments that privilege personalisation, affective intensity and direct leader–follower engagement. Methods span qualitative, computational and experimental designs, with research concentrated on Twitter/X and Facebook. Most studies examine exclusionary, right-wing cases in European and Western contexts and associate them with polarisation, misinformation and declining institutional trust. Evidence remains largely correlational, and inclusionary or participatory variants are underexplored. We identify key gaps and call for greater analytical precision in assessing democratic consequences.
Yilmaz et al. (Fri,) studied this question.