Politics

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sreerupa Sanyal. Her focus is on incidental news exposure on social media platforms and its relationship to the strength of individual partisanship and political involvement.

Questions then are how partisanship strength influences political involvement, how political involvement affects incidental news exposure, and how both partisanship strength and political involvement affects incidental news exposure. This was tested through a multi-wave panel survey of some 500 respondents.

Partisanship strength did not predict political involvement; political involvement did predict higher incidental exposure; and strong partisans did …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Chiara Vargiu, who takes us back to Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech which preceded the coup attempt at the US Capitol. Can political leaders’ violent rhetoric contribute to a radicalised mindset which produces partisan violence, then?

This can be described as stochastic terrorism: leaders’ inflammatory rhetoric is not in itself calling for violent action, but it is amplified through mass or social media, and this normalised radical ideas to the extent that some individuals take it upon themselves to commit violent, terrorist acts …

As my battery runs out for today, I’m in a final session on partisanship at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which begins with a paper by Harry Yan. His focus is on the alignment between news headlines and images; such alignment is especially important now that headlines and header images frequently circulate together as news is shared on social media platforms.

To the extent that these align, they may represent a form of multimodal media bias, and such bias might also result on differences in social media engagement. The project tested this for a dataset of …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ross Dahlke, whose focus is on exposure to untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections. According to 2016 data, such exposure is actually fairly limited, but highly concentrated amongst a number of key groups: older adults and political partisans – but (how) has this changed in subsequent elections?

This project captured Web browsing data from a YouGov Pulse panel of some 1,100 participants for four weeks before and one after the respective election dates in 2020 and 2024; this is …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Maria Grub, whose interest is in susceptibility to pro-Kremlin rhetoric. Her focus is on populist politics in eastern Germany, where the neofascist AfD is now one of the most popular parties across several federal states; this is related at least in part to these states’ current economic issues.

There is a strong sense of political neglect and injustice amongst populations in these states, which leads to more populist voting; but this also affects positions on a broader range of issues. Such issues also …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Danny Yihan Jia, whose focus is on the global crisis in electoral legitimacy. The US is an obvious example here, with some 60 lawsuits relating to supposed electoral irregularities filed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election alone (all failed, of course); similar developments have taken place in Brazil, Kenya, and many other countries, and the ‘rigged election’ narratives are often translated from one country to another even though they lack any evidence.

Some of this can be credited to a ‘sore loser’ …

The next session I’m attending at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is on political microtargeting in election advertising. This is now a growing practice in elections around the world, and the perception of such ads by their targets depends on the congruence between advertising approaches and the sociodemographics of target groups.

But we are still missing rich qualitative data on the situational perception and evaluation of such ads by users in a realistic social media setting. The present study explored this through a think-aloud protocol study with …

The final speaker ion this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jana Peters, whose paper compares opinion poll predictions related to the unexpected 2025 German federal election with predictions generated by ChatGPT. How reliable are AI-generated election polls?

This relates to concerns about the role of horse-race journalism coverage in shaping public opinion during election campaigns, as citizens’ encounters of such polls might lead them to shape their own voting intentions accordingly (variously through bandwagon or underdog effects, for instance). And election polls are themselves not necessarily reliable, although citizens tend to trust these …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hal Xu, whose interest is in the Democratic governance of artificial intelligence. To what extent do citizens participate in this process? Participatory governance is critical here, but there are few pathways towards this, and in countries like the US, citizen trust in government institutions is very low to begin with, further discouraging such participation.

There are two key structural asymmetries here: information asymmetry between AI providers and users; and power asymmetry between corporations, governments, and other elites on the one hand, and …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on AI and politics, and starts with a paper by Bohan Zhang and colleagues on AI-generate disinformation in the 2024 US presidential election. This election has been described as one of the first where AI content played a significant role; this included counterfeit AI video and audio on social media platforms.

Such content taps on existing political cynicism: this may both make some people more resistant to AI content due to their overall rejection of political propaganda, but also lead to others embracing AI content as …