IAMCR 2023

Towards a New Empiricism: Polarisation across Four Dimensions

Axel Bruns, Tariq Choucair, Katharina Esau, Sebastian Svegaard, and Samantha Vilkins

• 11 July 2023 – Paper presented at the IAMCR 2023 conference, Lyon

Presentation Slides

Abstract

There is a perception in many countries that public debate is increasingly polarised and dysfunctional. If so, this presents a critical danger to the democratic processes (McCoy & Somer, 2019). Yet there is little agreement about the drivers and dynamics of such polarisation, nor are different countries and their media and political systems equally affected by these developments; further progress in developing a more comprehensive understanding of these divergences is also hindered by the considerable overrepresentation of the United States and its unique (and uniquely dysfunctional) political and communicative environments in extant research on polarisation.

In addition, the literature on polarisation has seen a proliferation of the number of proposed types of polarisation in recent years: from conventional forms of ideological and issue-based polarisation through affective and identity-based polarisation (e.g. Iyengar et al., 2012) to interpretive and interactional polarisation (e.g. Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2020), and beyond. It remains unclear how these may be clearly and systematically identified and distinguished by comparative empirical work, especially if such work is also going to take into account national and regional specificities. Considerable further conceptual and methodological advancements and consolidation are required.

Part of a panel that brings together inputs from several major research projects on polarisation from around the world, this paper presents the conceptual framework of a large-scale research project funded by the Australian Research Council that explores the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation in online public debate. We approach this challenge by identifying four major dimensions where evidence of polarisation may be found: we study polarisation in news coverage by investigating how different outlets frame the same topics and issues; we examine polarisation amongst news audiences by tracking which subsets of online news audiences engage with and share what news sources; we identify polarisation in online public discourse by mapping the patterns of engagement and interaction between participants in key topical debates; and we explore polarisation in online networks by analysing the clusters and discontinuities in the longer-term connections between participants in public discourse. We further draw on computational and manual content and discourse analysis to examine the rational, affective, and other discursive markers used and thus distinguish between possible forms of polarisation.

The project examines these patterns against the backdrop of the media and political systems of the countries where such debates take place, producing internationally comparative evidence that explores whether their different national settings (two- or multi-party systems; concentrated or diverse media markets; weak or strong public service media) correlate with divergent polarising tendencies. In doing so, we seek to restore some much-needed diversity to the study of polarisation, as a field that has been overly dominated in recent times by the attention paid to the pernicious polarisation evident in the United States during and after the Trump presidency.

Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), 405–431. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfs038

Kligler-Vilenchik, N., Baden, C., & Yarchi, M. (2020). Interpretative Polarization across Platforms: How Political Disagreement Develops Over Time on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. Social Media + Society, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120944393

McCoy, J., & Somer, M. (2019). Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 681(1), 8–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716218818058