Polarisation

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Heesoo Jang, whose interest is in the potential biases in Large Language Models. In the United States, a majority of Republican nominees for office in the last mid-term elections denied or questioned the 2020 presidential election results, and in Brazil similar election denialist groups have emerged. This is worsened by political attacks on press freedoms in these and other countries; globally, the challenges to democracies by the rise of far-right authoritarianism are growing. But most existing theories and concepts still focus on ‘stable’ democracies, wherever we might …

The post-lunch session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose interest is in measuring polarising discourses during election campaigns. Tariq and the team have developed a method to measure polarisation at the level of specific discourses: it is rooted in core principles and operationalised approaches that are adaptable to other contexts. Measuring polarisation at the discourse level is important; so far, so much of the work on polarisation has been done using surveys on self-reported political positioning or feelings towards leaders or parties, or has drawn on voting patterns …

The keynote speaker on this section day of the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the wonderful Annie Waldherr from the University of Vienna, whose focus is on the use of online visual content for connective action and communication, especially also in the context of conflict. How do strategic actors and activists use visual communication, what narratives do they promote, how do audiences engage with this, and how do such narratives spread on social media as a result?

Annie’s work focusses on climate narratives in Austria and Germany, in particular, but the broader team also covers a wider …

The next speaker in this session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Andrew Fitzgerald, whose interest is in the use of longitudinal mobile screenshot data in research. This is another response to the emerging challenges in doing research on the power of platforms – platform infrastructures continue to change in their interface design and affordances, algorithmic curation affects what actual content users encounter, access approaches to platform data keep evolving, and new platforms emerge all the time. This means that we need independent data collection methods, beyond what the platforms themselves do or do not provide …

The final presenters at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference this evening are my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Tim Graham, presenting a pilot project leading into a larger research project on ‘dark political communication’: expanding from a narrow focus on disinformation to examine the problematic communication strategies of political elites for political gain. One strategy in such communication is disinformative attacks: here, political actors make specific false claims regarding their political opponents, and manage to get these covered by journalists because journalism has a negativity bias, conflict bias, and/or an immediacy and timeliness bias. Such attacks seem …

Up next at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference are my QUT colleagues Kate O’Connor-Farfan and Ehsan Dehghan, whose interest is in connecting the theories of agonism and antagonism by Laclau and Mouffe with the social semiotics of Landowski; both are rooted in post-structural social semiotics, but advance in different directions.

Laclau and Mouffe distinguish between two kinds of antagonism: between enemies, attempting to eliminate the other – genuine antagonism; or between adversaries, aiming to sublimate differences – which is then better described as agonism. But it remains difficult to operationalise such theoretical concepts, and other conceptual tools …

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Henri Mütschele, whose focus is on the interplay between traditional and social media in positional polarisation. What are the opinion dynamics in networked publics? This project focusses on positional or ideological polarisation, two concepts which are often used synonymously, and sees polarisation as a process in which positional distances between two entities are growing.

Such polarisation need not be symmetrical between the groups involved, and can be measured along two dimensions: along a left-right political scale and along a GAL-TAN scale that examines the political values of …