Polarisation

The afternoon at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Lena Frischlich, who shifts our focus to the question of conspiracy theories as they circulate in transnational counterpublic spheres. The digital environment provides many opportunities for new political movements, and many of them are positive in nature, but there are also many opportunities for what Thorsten Quandt has described as ‘dark participation’.

What circulates here might be misinformation (claims that counter the currently available evidence, intentionally or not); selective information choices; and purposeful, fabricated disinformation. Typical disinformation campaigns might place deceptive information in an otherwise …

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Cornelius Puschmann, presenting work from the excellent POLTRACK project on polarisation and individualised online information environments, which has been conducting a longitudinal panel study as well as tracking participants’ online activities in Germany over a period of 20 months since March 2023.

This presentation focusses especially on participants’ search practices, with search of course representing a key pathway to political information. This project focussed especially on searches for information on German political actors, and was especially interested in the role of affect towards those actors, and of …

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with a presentation by Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on polarised debates around climate protests by groups like Letzte Generation or Extinction Rebellion. Such debates do not take place in a vacuum, however, but are informed and framed by media reporting. Is such reporting polarising these debates? What might this polarisation lead to?

There is a communicative side to polarisation processes, then – this can be understood as discursive polarisation: the divergence of a sphere of consensus into multiple such spheres that represent a disrupted public sphere. This might …

It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here:

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session, and indeed the symposium overall, is Aidar Zinnatullin, who shifts our focus to Russia. This will examine the period in Russia before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (from 2015 to 2021), when it was already a depoliticised society under authoritarian leadership and political stability was the central mantra of Putin’s rule. The implied social contract here was to provide increased prosperity for the people as long as they did not become politically active.

The Russian opposition under Alexey Navalny managed to cut through this stasis by producing popular and engaging content and …

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Rita Marchetti, who shifts our attention to another scandal: the Qatargate case. She notes the limited attention of media scholars to corruption issues, even in spite of growing funding for anticorruption studies of legacy media – the potential role of social media in anticorruption activism has received very limited attention, in particular. There is more interest from economics than media scholars in this, it seems.

Italy has long been perceived as suffering from corruption, and this is frustrating citizens and politicians – but recent corruption indices do document that corruption remains …

The final session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium in Bologna starts with Marco Mazzoni, whose focus is on media populism – and he centres his presentation on the politicisation of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal as a media event in the early 1990s, which became the starting-point of media populism in Italy.

The scandal evolved during 1992-4, and ended the careers of several prominent politicians. It started with the arrest of a local politician, Mario Chiesa, in Milan, but was transformed into a national media event when the secretary of the Italian Socialist Party Bettino Craxi was drawn into the scandal …

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Sergio Martini, whose interest is in the role of media in perceived polarisation. This might be driven by the conflict focus in media coverage, and its attention especially to extreme positions – but are there ways to counteract this and contribute to depolarisation instead?

The concept of issue framing is key here: how issues are interpreted in media coverage can affect citizens’ perception of these issues. This might include thematic framing (of the facts relating to a story), which might drive issue polarisation, or episodic and exemplary framing (the selection of …

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Danilo Serani, whose focus is on affective polarisation, political distrust, and populist attitudes in Italy. Affective polarisation seems to be on the rise globally, but how can we explain this development? It may be driven at least in part by what Danilo calls ‘demand-side populism’ (individuals’ pre-existing populist attitudes), as well as by underlying political distrust.

Affective polarisation describes strong attachment to one’s own in-group as well as negative sentiment and outright animosity towards out-groups. This is more complicated in multi-party than bipolar political systems, of course. Populism is centred on …

The next session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium starts with Giuliano Bobba, whose focus is on Italian citizens’s attitudes towards the EU during the COVID-19 crisis. There has been a growing recognition of the importance and roles of European institutions, and their activities are entwined and sometimes conflict with the political agendas of national governments; this produces a dynamic of politicisation.

Determinants of support for the EU include a cost-benefit evaluation, economic and cultural dimensions, and party cues, and such questions are further heightened at times of crisis. Immediate utilitarian considerations focus on what benefits citizens receive from the EU …