Polarisation

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 …

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Patrícia Rossini, who is also focussing on incivility. She begins by noting that this is a feature, and not a bug, of social media, and that conventional empirical research into incivility on social media tends to examine blatant forms (name-calling, profanity) rather than implementing more sophisticated perspectives.

Off-the-shelf solutions for such research like the Google Perspective API also tend to implement these fairly generic ideas, and often produce a merely binary score that shows whether incivility is or is not present. Such tools are often trained for industry rather than scholarly …

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 …

The second day at I-POLHYS 2024 starts with a paper by the great Laura Ianelli and Giada Marino, who will recap I-POLHYS research activities on the connections between polarisation and problematic information. These concepts have been increasingly connected in the literature, and Laura and Giada conducted a systematic literature review of such research – yet only a small handful of the articles referencing both phenomena actually address them in any meaningful way; elsewhere the terms are more often used as buzzwords.

Both phenomena suffer from ambiguous definitions and a blending with other problematic concepts (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) – but …

And we’ll finish the day at I-POLHYS 2024 with my keynote, which builds on the work of my Australian Laureate Fellowship team to review the types of polarisation that have been identified in the literature and develop the concept of destructive polarisation as a particularly concerning stage of polarisation dynamics. Our research proposes five distinct symptoms of destructive polarisation – and in the keynote I reflect on the recent Australian referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to explore to what extent these five symptoms of destructive polarisation were present in the news and digital media debates in the lead-up …

The final speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Alessia Donà, whose focus is on the two parties of the populist radical right in Italy, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia. The populist radical right combines the thin ideology of populism with the thick ideology of nativism and nationalism: where populism often simply distinguishes between in- and out-groups, the radical right builds on xenophobia and positions foreigners as threats to the national identity and nation state, and positions authoritarianism as a solution to the problems of society.

This represents a politics of fear, presenting real or imagined threats that can build …

The next speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Annett Heft, whose focus is on gender contestations and polarisation in Germany. Gender has become a contested topic in Germany in recent times, with anti-feminism and attacks on gender-inclusive language growing especially on the far right; an emphasis on ‘traditional’ roles for women is a core principle for the far-right, and far-right women in particular also play a substantial role in pushing such ideologies.

This also intersects with other actors, including conservative and elitist feminism, Christian fundamentalism, and other groups whose ideological perspectives enable them to enter discourse coalitions with …