Affective Polarisation and Media Use in Italy

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is David Coppini, whose interest is in news consumption and affective polarisation in the Italian context. Italy has a polarised pluralistic media system: the multi-party political system, comprised of three key blocs, is mirrored to some extent by an aligned polarised media system, but there is also a group of broadly neutral news organisations.

Affective polarisation in such a political system may also be associated with divergent patterns of news consumption, but may also be affected by partisan identity or policy preferences. The present study examines this through a two-wave survey before and after the 2022 Italian election.

This found that the use of neutral news strongly related to reduced affective polarisation; relationships for congruent news use were considerably weaker. There were more notable indirect connections between neutral as well as congruent news use, partisan identity or issue strength, and affective polarisation. However, it should be noted that this is based only on self-reported news consumption (and does not take into account social media use for news), rather than observations of actual news use.