The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Amrat Haq, whose focus is on polarisation amongst young people in Pakistan. Pakistani politics has long been populist in nature, and dominated by two broad political groups; however, a third party emerged in the 2010s in the form of Imran Khan’s highly personality-base party, and particularly courted younger voter groups – not least also through its use of social media.
This use of social media by Khan’s party was notable especially in the 2018 election; by the 2024 election the other parties had also caught up with this effort. Pakistan’s population is quite young overall, with a substantial voters turnout; political and populist campaigning that addresses them has led to considerable polarisation amongst these voters.
The study explored this by surveying some 350 Pakistani university students between 18 and 25 who voted in the 2018 and/or 2024 elections, and examined their political polarisation, populist attitudes, and social media usage patterns alongside more general demographics. Key social media platforms were Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Xitter (which is technically blocked in Pakistan but can be accessed via VPN). TikTok is especially popular with younger users; Facebook persists with older users.
Political polarisation is especially pronounced for supporters of Imran Khan’s PTI party, and present but less strong for supporters of the older parties; other voters – with less political engagement – are also less polarised. These patterns also repeat for markers like anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manichean views. Younger voters have more populist views.
Social media users generally felt that they were more likely to be surrounded by like-minded views on their social media platforms (described here incorrectly as evidence for ‘echo chambers’, though really this is simply a measure of relative homophily and homogeneity within a specific subset of the respondents’ media repertoire), and this was especially pronounced for TikTok. Greater populist attitudes also led to increases in affective polarisation; a more homogenous social media environment further enhances this relationship.
These observations apply only to a fairly narrow sample of university students, however; they need to be tested for much broader demographics, and for a broader mix of media use.
