The first action book was published in August 2016:

Populist Political Communication in Europe. New York: Routledge, Toril Aalberg, Frank Esser, Carsten Reinemann, Jesper Strömbäck & Claes de Vreese (Eds.)

60 authors have contributed to the book, where 52 of these are action participants. The publication includes country reports from 25 European countries.

Many action members have been able to visit other institutions through the use of Short Term Scientific Missions (STSM). In our first year, eight scholars from eight different countries were given the opportunity to visit different institutions to expand their international experience and collaboration.

"Early Stage Researcher Think Tank", the first action Training School was organized in Zurich, Switzerland in January 2015. 20 dedicated young scholars from 12 countries presented their work and discussed new perspectives on Populist Political Communication.

The first action conference took place in March 2015 in Athens as part of the 2^nd MC and WG meeting.

Keynote speakers were:

Cas Mudde: The conceptual development of populism and its use in empirical research

Linda Bos: Dissecting the role of the media in populist success

Frank Esser: The Appeal of Populist Ideas and Messages – An Ongoing Project

Final session: Roundtable on The Media and the crisis

Engaged Action participants learned a lot from the first country reviews presented at the second joint meetings held in Lisbon in November 2014. A total of 28 countries had submitted reviews of the state research on populism and populists political communication.
In Lisbon all country teams presented some of the highlights from their reivews. Based on the quality of these reviews the WG chairs suggested to create an edited volume with country chapters. The MC approved and this volume will also include a few general introductory chapters, as well as concluding chapters related to the three working groups. The updated book chapters will be presented at the next Action meeting in Athens in March 2015.  

All the countries who had signed the MoU attended the first MC-meeting of COST Action IS1308. The first meeting, held in Brussel on April 7 2014, was considered a huge success. 34 scholars from 24 COST member states participated.
The dedicated attendees all agreed to the organizational structure, that was presented by Toril Aalberg  who represented the proposer of the Action. At the meeting  Aalberg was unanimously elected to become the Chair of the Action, while Claes de Vreese was unanimously elected Vice Chair.

It was decided that every MC member must be an active member of one of three Working Groups. While in Brussels, the MC members who were present, signed up for their preferred Working Group. MC members who were not present in Brussel or MC members who will join the Action after the first meeting, need to indicate  their WG preference online.

The Management Committee agreed that that the first scientific task of the action should be to complete a literature review of extant research within  the participating COST-countries that addresses each of the three key themes of the  COST-action: (1) Populist actors as communicators, (2) The media and populism and (3) Citizens and populism. The results from these reviews was presented at the 2nd joint meetings in Lisbon in November 2014.

The Network of European Political Communication Scholars (NEPOCS) has successfully applied to EU's COST framework (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) to establish a COST Action on populist political communication from different angles.

The new Action was established in 2014, and fit neatly in with the overall aim of NEPOCS:  to further research and teaching in comparative political communication.

The new COST Action will be guided by a social scientific approach and follow the principles of what NEPOCS members know as the four C's:  Collaboration. Conceptualization. Comparability. Cumulativity.  NEPOCS strongly believe in the importance of research collaboration within as well as across countries, and in the need for clear conceptualizations of key concepts. In this case concepts related to populism and populist communication. NEPOCS also strongly believe in the need for comparability across countries and time, but also across studies. Through collaboration, clear conceptualizations and increasing comparability, we hope to contribute to increasing research cumulativity within the field of comparative political communication, in general and now within the field of populist political communication more specifically.