Elections

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sara Monteiro Machado, whose focus is on social media use and youth political participation in Portugal. She notes that political science has failed to keep up with emerging forms of political participation in the current environment; such forms traditionally include institutionalised participation, protests, and volunteering, but now also consumerist participation, digital political participation, and lifestyle politics.

Youth are especially attracted to these new forms of unconventional political participation, perhaps to the detriment of actual voting in elections. In fact, electoral abstention is especially pronounced amongst young people. There is plenty of …

The final paper session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julia Gabriella Nogueira Munhoz, whose focus is on the culture of sexism directed at women in politics in Mato Grosso, Brazil, which is also part of a broader pattern in Brazilian politics. Mato Grosso has a conservative profile and the highest femicide rate in Brazil.

Sexism directed at women in politics here was examined by recording the personal narratives of women politicians in a podcast. While Brazil does not have an official far-right party, supporters of the Bolsonarist far-right movement can be found across 17 of the centrist and right-wing parties …

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

This project examined the Brazilian and Danish elections of 2022, with particular focus on the leading contenders in each election: Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, and Ellemann-Jensen and Frederiksen in Denmark. We collected the Facebook posts by these leaders, using CrowdTangle, and engaged in a manual coding (by a Brazilian and a Dane) of these posts …

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else. Spain has seen the emergence of several new parties, and this shifts the structure of the overall party system considerably.

New parties include centrist parties, extreme left parties, and far right parties …

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

Such language constructs social imaginaries – and in the case of Democrat and Republican politicians, perhaps now multiple mutually exclusive social imaginaries – that are constitutive of the socio-communicative realities their voters believe they live in. Jenny’s …

The next presenter in this AoIR 2022 session is my current University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, who shifts our focus to the users of social media platforms. They need political knowledge to make rational decisions, but this is difficult in today’s high-choice informational environments; one key source for such information, of course, are search engines, but research on their role with regard to political issues and referenda remains very limited. The current study explores this in the Swiss content, examining how often Swiss citizens search for information on upcoming referenda. Generally, such search practices may be related to demographic …

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals. This project explores this for the 2019 European Parliamentary election, which may be a particularly easy target for anti-elitist populist communication, and less so for people-centred communication.

The question here is how this plays out at the page and post level on …