ECREA 2024

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Maxim Alyukov, whose focus is on the political psychology of authoritarian environments. He begins by noting the gaps in the available literature; there is a pressing need to further examine the psychologies of such authoritarian environments. An authoritarian environment is defined here as lacking political alternatives; featuring information manipulation; and involving overt or covert forms of violence as part of its political processes.

The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session are Sabina Mihelj and Václav Štětka, presenting a new framework for the understanding of current trends towards illiberalism. This focus on illiberalism follows the dismissal of the concept of populism as ill-defined; illiberalism is instead marking a grey zone between democracy and authoritarianism, and communication is a central element in its rise – indeed, there is a need to better investigate the illiberal public sphere.

The third speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Maria Bakardjieva, whose focus is on the affordances of social media in grassroots illiberalism. Affordances here describe a relation between users and objects, and media affordances include technical and institutional aspects. Maria notes the well-established problems with the term ‘populism’, which is a poorly defined concept that applies equally to the left and the right, and to democratic and antidemocratic discourses; this generates pseudo-equivalences between very different aspects.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Martin Marinos, whose interest is in populism and the far right in Bulgaria. He begins by challenging the notion of illiberalism, suggesting that the opposition between liberalism and illiberalism is not absolute, and that many countries instead display a kind of ‘ill liberalism’ instead. Historically, too, liberalism has sometimes led to the emergence of far-right regimes, so the border between liberalism and fascism is somewhat porous.

The next session at ECREA 2024 that I’m attending is on communication in times of illiberalism, and starts with Natalie-Anne Hall. Her focus is on political engagement around Brexit on Facebook, in the post-referendum period between 2017 and 2019. Rather than gathering Facebook content, this study focussed on Facebook users – in recognition of the fact that Facebook remains the leading mainstream social network in the UK.

We continue this second day of the ECREA 2024 conference with the second conference keynote, by Jelena Kleut. Her focus is on uncertainties in transitional media systems. She begins by noting the various present-day communicative disorders – disinformation, political dysfunction, hate speech and abuse, etc. – but also warns us not to lose track of the positive potentials of contemporary communication technologies amongst all the doom and gloom. A balanced assessment of the current situation remains critical.

This points to a considerable level of uncertainty, too – and this can be generative (of research, and of overall progress for society), but equally also produce social and societal anxieties that lead citizens to seek easy answers and solutions. Jelena’s focus here is on the countries of the western Balkans, which have been described as ‘transitional democracies’ for the past 30 years at least; here, too, uncertainties persist, and may be divided into top-down, structurally driven uncertainties and bottom-up, audience-driven uncertainties.

These are reflected for instance in mainstream media reporting approaches, and the dissemination of disinformation that surrounds or responds to this reporting. Why does such disinformation circulate? At the structural, top-down level we have been seeing the rise of a politics of uncertainty, used as a tool by autocrats and illiberal forces to shore up their systems of electoral authoritarianism. This connects with the capture of state and societal institutions by such political actors, which makes the actions of these institutions themselves uncertain and unreliable as they are no longer based on the rule of law and democratic foundations. Such electoral authoritarian governments also control access to information, therefore.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Dennis Andersson, whose interest is in the effect of ideological news use in Sweden. The observation that people hold diametrically opposed beliefs about where society is heading is not new, and predates online and social media use; education and other socioeconomic factors, as well as news media use, are often seen as factors in influencing citizens’ belief structures.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Nuri Sadida, whose focus is on the impact of ‘fake news’ and media literacy on affective polarisation in Indonesia. Such affective polarisation has increased in Indonesia over the past ten years, especially in the context of elections; derogatory nicknames for out-groups, such as ‘tadpole’ or ‘desert lizard’, are common especially in social media conversations.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Emma Turkenburg, who begins by highlighting growing concerns about affective polarisation. The worry here is that such polarisation has social as well as political consequences, yet the evidence for such political consequences is mixed; the growth and decline of polarisation in specific societies is highly context-bound and dynamic.

The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session are Tomasz Gackowski and his colleague whose name I did not catch; they begin by pointing to the considerable volume of research on social polarisation, and are especially interested in how such dynamics play out in Poland. They worked with a politically representative sample of residents in a major city in Poland, who were confronted with a range of anonymised quotations from politicians about the situation in Poland and Europe.