Polarisation

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Jihye Park, whose interest is in the role of media trust in reducing affective polarisation. Exposure to cross-cutting media has been recognised in the research as reducing polarisation, but what leads users to expose themselves to such cross-cutting media? Jihye suggests that media trust is critical to such media selection choices.

Her focus here is on affective polarisation – the emotional gap between in- and out-groups. This gap has been shown to grow in countries like the US and South Korea, for partisans of the dominant left and right …

The next speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel are Christiane Eilders and Henri Mütscheler, who note that positional polarisation (on distinct issues) also needs to be distinguished by level: micro-level polarisation between individuals; meso-level polarisation within groups or organisations; or macro-level polarisation between groups or organisations. Such polarisation is thus always relational (between two or more entities), as well as dynamic.

Most of the research to date has focussed on the micro- and macro-levels, especially focussing on political parties. There is also substantial focus on the affective dimension of polarisation, and on the movement of single entities towards …

I am presenting the next paper in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference, providing a brief overview of our Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of polarisation and partisanship. Here are the slides:

It’s the second and last day of the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference in Berlin, and it starts with a panel on polarisation that I’ve had a hand in organising. We begin with Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on discursive polarisation. He begins by pointing out that polarisation is often ill-defined, and the communicative dimension in particular is often under-conceptualised and under-researched.

Discursive polarisation is when debates break apart: a multi-dimensional divergence emerging in and through communication. There is also a more intuitive aspect to polarisation, as is demonstrated for instance with the German debate around the Letzte Generation climate activists …

The fourth speaker in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Ana Cardenal, who moves beyond reported to observed behaviour, with a particular focus on selective exposure practices. This combines survey data with Web tracking data across Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK.

For the Web tracking data, this focusses on visits to any on a list of news outlets, and from this determined how selective participants media diets were (in terms of time spent with left- or right-wing media. This also depends on a coding of the partisan slant of news media, of course, which was …

The second speaker in this panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Christine Meltzer, whose focus is on the perception of social cohesion in society, and its relationship with media use. Such cohesion is critical as it plays a crucial role in societies’ responses to crises.

Media use can contribute to perceived social cohesion in society if people consume the same media, if such media content supports some level of social cohesion and shared experience, and supports trust and tolerance. Such media often tend to be high-quality rather than alternative and hyperpartisan media.

How is media use associated with social …

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.

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This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …

The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation. The context for this is the pattern of elite-level radicalisation especially on the political right in a number of countries: this leads to a form of asymmetric polarisation, where the right drifts far further to the extremes than the left, in part through the influence of right-wing “alternative” “news” sites (the abundance of share quotes here is quite deliberate, Curd says).

This also follows a reconceptualisation of communication flows, to match the hybrid media systems that we …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.

It distinguishes between coordinators (mediating information flows within the in-group), itinerants (an in-group member mediating information flows between two out-group members), representatives (mediating information flows from in- to out-group), and gatekeepers (mediating information flow from out- to in-group). In these scenarios, the …