Exploring Citizens’ Understandings of Incivility in Politics

The next speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Rossella Rega, and her interest is in political incivility. Studies on this topic have increased substantially since the 2010s, as a new generation of political actors appeared on the scene. This points to a marked increase in aggression and incivility both in politics itself as well as in (some) media coverage.

But what we mean by incivility must also be clearly defined; civility tends to be in the eye of the beholder, and any definition is necessarily normative. There are two major components here: disrespect for norms governing personal interaction, and disrespect for norms governing democratic systems. These break down further into five dimensions: discursive, vulgar, informational, violent, and discriminatory incivility.

Rossella explored this further through an open-ended survey of some 1,000 participants in Italy, to see how these categories from the literature aligned with citizens’ own understandings of incivility. These confirmed some of these dimensions, but also surfaced condemnations of politics as a whole as uncivil and corrupt by definition, or a personification of incivility in specific controversial politicians. Overall, vulgar, discursive, and delegitimising forms of incivility were identified most often.

Overall, too, forms of incivility concerning disrespect for the norms governing democratic systems were mentioned more often than those concerning disrespect for the norms of personal interaction, and public-level rather than personal-level forms of incivility were highlighted more often. Respondents’ interest in politics emerged as a key variable determining these responses: High interest meant that respondents focussed mainly on specific forms of incivility, while those with low interest more often saw all politics as uncivil.

This also points to a divergence between citizens’ and scholars’ views of what constitutes or exemplifies incivility in politics. This means that we may need to seriously rethink the indicators of incivility and take better account of citizens’ own definitions – and in doing so emphasise violations of democratic norms over violations of interpersonal norms, since the latter appear to be less significant to citizens. It is also possible that these differences indicate a shift in public attitudes, as interpersonal incivility has become more commonplace and is now seen as less problematic. And of course these findings may be specific to Italy – further comparative work in other countries would also be valuable.