Elections

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sara Monteiro Machado, whose focus is on social media use and youth political participation in Portugal. She notes that political science has failed to keep up with emerging forms of political participation in the current environment; such forms traditionally include institutionalised participation, protests, and volunteering, but now also consumerist participation, digital political participation, and lifestyle politics.

The final paper session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julia Gabriella Nogueira Munhoz, whose focus is on the culture of sexism directed at women in politics in Mato Grosso, Brazil, which is also part of a broader pattern in Brazilian politics. Mato Grosso has a conservative profile and the highest femicide rate in Brazil.

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else.

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

The next presenter in this AoIR 2022 session is my current University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, who shifts our focus to the users of social media platforms. They need political knowledge to make rational decisions, but this is difficult in today’s high-choice informational environments; one key source for such information, of course, are search engines, but research on their role with regard to political issues and referenda remains very limited.

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals.