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For the next session at ECREA 2024 I am once again in a session on polarisation, and we start with a double-header presentation by Quirin Ryffel and Nayla Fawzi. They begin with an overview of polarisation patterns in German – here, as in many other European countries, there is no simplistic left/right polarisation as there is in the US, but more usually polarisation on specific issues. One of these is environmental policy.

There is broad consensus on the science of climate change and the need for action in Germany; however, there are also strong perceptions of polarisation between groups who …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Dominika Betakova, whose interest is in news avoidance – a growing pattern around the world. Such news avoidance is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, though: it may be intentional, or may simply represent a low level of news consumption – and the people who engage in one or the other practice are not necessarily the same.

Intentional news avoidance may be temporal (e.g. during the COVID-19 pandemic), and can lead to better mental health; it can also be related to greater adherence to misbeliefs, a lack of political knowledge, and less political participation …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Ernesto de León; his focus is on hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracy (HAC) media. These are all united by an anti-establishment dimension: they peddle misinformation that has a potential to shape public perceptions. Ernesto points here for example to a strange case of such sites promoting stories about elite sportspeople collapsing on the field; they promoted these stories as part of an anti-vaccine campaign claiming (falsely, of course) a connection between such medical cases and their vaccination with the COVID-19 vaccine.

But such content also circulates on non-HAC media sites, and through …

The third speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Michael Hameleers. He begins by highlighting the supposed threat of mis- and disinformation, but also notes that the dissemination of such content is not necessarily very widespread; news users are very concerned about misinformation, however, and about their own susceptibility to such misinformation – they think much of the information they encounter is mis- or disinformation.

This means that we need to focus further on such risk perceptions, and on what groups in society are most likely to hold such perceptions. It seems likely that such perceptions about misinformation are also …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Peter van Aelst, whose interest is in how news media consumption affects conspiracy theory beliefs. Mediating factors here might include misperception and populist attitudes, and the present paper examines this in the context of conspiracy theories that believe that a small elite of actors deliberately hide the truth about what is happening in the world.

These beliefs might be heightened if people hold existing misperceptions already – e.g. about the efficacy of vaccines, or the impacts of migration –, as well as by populist attitudes that predispose people to be sceptical …

The final day at ECREA 2024 begins for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, and a paper by the great Annett Heft. Her focus is on the diffusion dynamics of conspiracy theories across platforms. She begins by noting the substantial growth in conspiracy theory diffusion, and the severe consequences these ideas can have. Cross-platform activity (involving social media, social messaging, multimedia platforms, alternative news media, and mainstream media) can further heighten this impact.

This project focusses on the two far-right conspiracy theories of the New World Order, with a strong anti-Semitic component, and the Great Replacement / White Genocide …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Maxim Alyukov, whose focus is on the political psychology of authoritarian environments. He begins by noting the gaps in the available literature; there is a pressing need to further examine the psychologies of such authoritarian environments. An authoritarian environment is defined here as lacking political alternatives; featuring information manipulation; and involving overt or covert forms of violence as part of its political processes.

Individual authoritarian personalities are commonly seen as involving a range of key personality traits: these involve right-wing authoritarian views, orientation towards social dominance, conservatism, low openness to new …

The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session are Sabina Mihelj and Václav Štětka, presenting a new framework for the understanding of current trends towards illiberalism. This focus on illiberalism follows the dismissal of the concept of populism as ill-defined; illiberalism is instead marking a grey zone between democracy and authoritarianism, and communication is a central element in its rise – indeed, there is a need to better investigate the illiberal public sphere.

There are three constitutive features here: the paradoxical emergence of and dependence of illiberalism on liberal democratic institutions and values, and their championing of liberal values such …

The third speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Maria Bakardjieva, whose focus is on the affordances of social media in grassroots illiberalism. Affordances here describe a relation between users and objects, and media affordances include technical and institutional aspects. Maria notes the well-established problems with the term ‘populism’, which is a poorly defined concept that applies equally to the left and the right, and to democratic and antidemocratic discourses; this generates pseudo-equivalences between very different aspects.

Illiberalism is more useful in describing a specific regime type, founded in an ideology and culture that is conjured up by supportive intellectuals …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Martin Marinos, whose interest is in populism and the far right in Bulgaria. He begins by challenging the notion of illiberalism, suggesting that the opposition between liberalism and illiberalism is not absolute, and that many countries instead display a kind of ‘ill liberalism’ instead. Historically, too, liberalism has sometimes led to the emergence of far-right regimes, so the border between liberalism and fascism is somewhat porous. Especially on economic matters, there are certainly sometimes parallels between liberalism and far-right authoritarianism in their support for an unrestrained capitalism.

Notably, for instance, the …