Politics

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Maja Šimunjak, who shifts our focus to the Twitter activities of Donald Trump in the early stages of his presidency, and to the responses these received from foreign leaders.

Trump mentioned some six leaders and 19 countries in the first months of his presidency, and this is considerable greater than the activity of many other national leaders; his mentions are often directed more at America’s (or Trump’s) perceived enemies than acknowledging its friends. Such mentions can then be analysed for their use of conventional diplomatic language (qualifying, hedging, polite, positive, and/or …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sjifra de Leeuw, whose interest is in the recent rise of populist parties that also take an explicit stance against the role of mainstream media as supposedly elitist gatekeepers.

When news media frame such parties as anti-democratic, this has a distinct effect on their positioning, but not all extremist parties are marked in this way – and which are marked this way by the media may depend on the political history of the nation: nations with a leftist autocratic history may be more likely to brand leftist parties as anti-democratic, while …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Alexandre Borrell, whose focus is on references to ‘the people’ in political rhetoric in the past two French presidential elections. Are such references used similarly by candidates from different political camps, or do left- and right-wing candidates use them differently? The study used official posters, statements, and TV ads from the campaigns to analyse this.

Reference to the people is common for the campaigns of the far-right Front National under both Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, as well as for the populist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon of Front de Gauche. Not a …

The next ECREA 2018 session starts with Christina Peter, who begins by noting the reference to (supposed) popular opinion as a common rhetorical strategy of populist politicians as well as of journalists; this is classified as an explicit public opinion cue. By contrast, implicit public opinion cues simply represent public opinion for instance in the form of vox-pops.

Such explicit cues are very prominent in the media, while implicit cues are somewhat less prominent; what effects do they have on the formation of popular opinion, however? Does this convince actual citizens that the general public truly hold these views? Christina’s …

Finally for this ECREA 2018 session, Natalie Fenton asks how we as academics might therefore need to reconsider our own work in political communication. If we are considering different ways of doing democracy, this is inevitably also a question of power, of course, and it has immediate and critical implications for societies in which the gaps between the powerful and the powerless are rapidly widening.

As the institutions – especially at local levels – in which publics have traditionally sought to engage are being hollowed out and shut down (for instance as a result of austerity policies such as those …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Aeron Davis, whose focus is on the role of political parties in political communication. Might we head towards a (non-)democratic future in which parties no longer exist in their present state – or is it just the dominant party model that is failing now?

On a variety of measures, including membership and participation, party structures have been declining for several decades; in many national systems, this has also contributed to an increased volatility in vote shares from election to election, independent of the voting systems (first-past-the-post or proportional representation) used in …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Gholam Khiabany, who points especially at the absence of significant debates about war and military intervention in political communication. War is not absent from media research, of course, but perhaps war should be considered as central in our reassessment of democracy itself.

Militarism and war is now a motor of historical development, and not just a consequence; revisiting political communication must include a reassessment of its role in democracy, and as a subject of political communication. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, should it not be central …

The post-lunch session at ECREA 2018 is on media, democracy, and social change, and starts with Des Freedman. He begins by noting the role of the state as a particular, and particularly important, institutional power in political communication, whose role tends to be underresearched compared to that of various non-state actors from politicians to activists – perhaps because the idea of the state is seen as somewhat dated, following the decline in authority of territorial nation states.

States have outsourced many of their functions to the private sector, and have been overtaken by globalised commercial players, to such an extent …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose focus is on polarisation in Twitter-based discussions of inter-ethnic conflicts in the U.S., Germany, and Russia. She also notes that the debate about whether echo chambers and filter bubbles are real is still ongoing, and that attitudes towards political actors have been most researched to date; divergence in such attitudes is often interpreted as polarisation, but this often mistakes the formation of homophilous clusters for actual polarisation. Importantly, too, cluster formation is often non-binary, and instead leads to the development of multiple, overlapping, and dynamic thematic clusters …

The next speaker in this session at ECREA 2018 is Anne-Marie in der Au, who notes evidence that individual selection of media content may foster polarisation; however, there is also suspicion that algorithmic selection may foster such polarisation by building on and reinforcing such selective exposure. But empirical evidence on this is divided; several studies show no algorithmic impact or even demonstrate a negative correlation. What is going on here, and are there other variables that may interfere?

The present study examined these dynamics for the case of Germany, building on a representative phone survey. This measured the polarisation of …