ICA 2023

Affective Polarisation in Political Leaders' Discourses: A Comparison between Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú

Sebastian Svegaard, Tariq Choucair, Kate O'Connor Farfan, and Axel Bruns

• 25 May 2023 – Paper presented at the ICA 2023 preconference Comparative Digital Political Communication: Comparisons across Countries, Platforms, and Time, Toronto

Presentation Slides

Abstract

In this paper, we assess the social media communication strategies of the two main contenders in four national elections in 2021 and 2022. Our analysis focuses on the role of affective polarisation in these election campaigns and the relationship/s between polarisation and political systems.

The target countries represent different electoral and political systems, from the strictly presidential system in Brazil to Perú’s presidential system with multiple lower-profile candidates; from Australia’s multi-party system dominated by two party blocs to the more diverse multi-party system in Denmark. This diversity in systems should be reflected in different patterns of partisanship and polarisation.

Different conditions may therefore offer both candidates and their supporters diverging incentives to engage in polarising rhetoric. In systems that are highly focussed on individual leaders there may be a tendency to develop a clear distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, while multi-party systems, in contrast, offer a wider range of possible fault lines with more fine-grained us-versus-them constructions, potentially resulting in a more multi-sided rather than dyadic network of polarisations.

Building on comprehensive datasets of the posts by political leaders on Facebook and Twitter in each of these national elections, we investigate the relative presence and discursive operationalisation of affective language, and in this paper present a systematic comparison between the patterns for these four nations. This produces new insights into the interrelationship between affective polarisation and the structures of electoral and political systems.