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The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation. The context for this is the pattern of elite-level radicalisation especially on the political right in a number of countries: this leads to a form of asymmetric polarisation, where the right drifts far further to the extremes than the left, in part through the influence of right-wing “alternative” “news” sites (the abundance of share quotes here is quite deliberate, Curd says).

This also follows a reconceptualisation of communication flows, to match the hybrid media systems that we …

I’m on the road again, and in Berlin for the two-day ECREA PolCom 2023 conference. We begin with a keynote by Lance Bennett, building on his recent book Communicating the Future. His opening question is how the major political ideas that affect everyone’s lives navigate the noise of everyday communication: how do they become dominant, and can we build a conceptual model to explain this? Are those ideas that become dominant actually good ideas, and if not, how can this be changed through better communication? Underlying this is also the question of power, of course.

Current dominant ideas …

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by …

And we end this very diverse and, given the weather, frankly very draining IAMCR 2023 with a closing keynote by Annika Egan Sjölander. She begins by reminding us of the theme of this conference, ‘Inhabiting the Planet’: how does media and communication scholarship contribute to this aim, especially in what we, and future generations of scholars, do next? How do we work towards the common good?

Annika is a scholar from Sweden, but also works in the Global South; she is based in a marginal region, in the Arctic Circle, and on Sápmi land, in a region which climate change …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.

It distinguishes between coordinators (mediating information flows within the in-group), itinerants (an in-group member mediating information flows between two out-group members), representatives (mediating information flows from in- to out-group), and gatekeepers (mediating information flow from out- to in-group). In these scenarios, the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Marko M. Skoric, whose interest is in incidental exposure to political information on social media. The present study is especially interested in exposure to people of different religions, from the perspective of Pakistani users. Such exposure is also critical to the avoidance of ‘echo chambers’, of course – but the context of such exposure also matters, of course: for instance with respect to the (in)civility of the content that is encountered.

In Pakistan, exposure to pro-minority content on social media might be in the context of music, sports, or movies, for …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Justin Martin, whose interest is in news junkies – or people with a ‘need for orientation’ (NFO), which has traditionally been measured in a simplistic, US-centric way as interest in and uncertainty about the choices in US presidential elections. The present study replaces this with a new NFO scale that better explores news junkies’ intrinsic need for orientation (INFO).

The INFO scale asks four questions: whether people check the news first thing in the day; check the news during downtime; feel more connected to other people by keeping up with the …

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.

Youth are especially attracted to these new forms of unconventional political participation, perhaps to the detriment of actual voting in elections. In fact, electoral abstention is especially pronounced amongst young people. There is plenty of …

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.

Sexism directed at women in politics here was examined by recording the personal narratives of women politicians in a podcast. While Brazil does not have an official far-right party, supporters of the Bolsonarist far-right movement can be found across 17 of the centrist and right-wing parties …