Rising political polarization is, in part, attributed to the fragmentation of news media and the spread of misinformation on social media. Previous reviews have yet to assess the full breadth of ...research on media and polarization. We systematically examine 94 articles (121 studies) that assess the role of (social) media in shaping political polarization. Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, we find an increase in research over the past 10 years and consistently find that pro-attitudinal media exacerbates polarization. We find a hyperfocus on analyses of Twitter and American samples and a lack of research exploring ways (social) media can depolarize. Additionally, we find ideological and affective polarization are not clearly defined, nor consistently measured. Recommendations for future research are provided.
Drawing on interviews with staffers from the 2012 Obama and Romney presidential campaigns and qualitative content analysis of their Twitter feeds, this article provides the first inside look at how ...staffers used the platform to influence the agendas and frames of professional journalists, as well as appeal to strong supporters. These campaigns sought to influence journalists in direct and indirect ways, and planned their strategic communication efforts around political events such as debates well in advance. Despite these similarities, staffers cite that Obama’s campaign had much greater ability to respond in real time to unfolding commentary around political events given an organizational structure that provided digital staffers with a high degree of autonomy. After analyzing the ways staffers discuss effective communication on the platform, this article argues that at extraordinary moments campaigns can exercise what Isaac Reed calls “performative power,” influence over other actors’ definitions of the situation and their consequent actions through well-timed, resonant, and rhetorically effective communicative action and interaction.
Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be ...seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. The central theoretical claim of this piece is that political identities map more or less onto social groups, and groups are, in turn, located in social structures. As such, scholars must analyze groups as they are embedded in relations of power to meaningfully evaluate the democratic consequences of polarization. Groups struggling for equality, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, often cause polarization because they threaten the extant power and status of dominant groups. To develop a shared theoretical lens around polarization and its relationship with inequality, we take up the case of research on the role of platforms in polarization, showing how scholarship routinely lacks analysis of inequality.
Although images have always been part of politics, research on the visual aspects of political communication recently gained momentum, especially with the spread of social media–based political ...communication. However, there are still several significant research gaps in this field. The aim of this article is to identify and compare the patterns and effects of Hungarian politicians’ (n = 51) image-based communication on Facebook (n = 2,992) and Instagram (n = 868) during the Hungarian parliamentary election campaign in 2018. By doing so, we shed light on two important dimensions of personalization: individualization and privatization. This work is designed to fill three gaps in the literature. We argue that existing research of visual political communication (1) treats images predominantly as illustrations, (2) is limited to single-platform studies, and (3) does not investigate the engagement effects of images. To move beyond these limitations, this study investigates images as objects of interest on their own; it adopts a cross-platform comparative approach and examines the engagement effects of visual cues by applying a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis. Our results show that images are often used to personalize communication. While on Facebook the individualization dimension of personalization is more common and popular, on Instagram its privatization dimension prevails. Furthermore, on Facebook, users like more politics-related candidate-centered images, but on Instagram we could not find similar effects for more informal visuals.
The political use of social media is a well-established field of research. We perform a content analysis of the messages posted on Instagram—one of the fastest growing social networking sites—by the ...leaders of the four main political parties in Spain, with special emphasis on the interactive use of this platform and the functions played by the posts. The sample of Instagram posts includes a non-election period and a period of regional elections. The results point to a practically irrelevant use of interactive tools, and an emphasis on the self-promotion of leaders and their parties. Accordingly, the data show that Instagram is basically used by Spanish leaders as a supplement to their campaign efforts and strategic objectives. These findings are discussed and linked to broader theoretical issues such as the hypothesis of normalization and the use of the Internet for broadcasting.
In the hybrid media system, many processes are reforming political communication: popularisation, disintermediation, personalisation, intimisation and of course populism. This study proposes an ...empirical definition of political communication style with the aim of identifying characteristics of the populist political communication style. Between 2015 and 2016, the Twitter timelines of the main political leaders in Italy were analysed for 16 months. Applying an MCA allowed us to identify two key factors that characterise the communication styles of leaders: (1) communication mode, comparing negative and positive; and (2) communicative focus, comparing personalisation and political/campaign. The intersection of these two factors resulted in four different political communication styles: 'Engaging', 'Intimate', 'Champion of the people' and 'Man of the street'. The latter two were clearly characterised by the presence of populist ideology fragments and traits, but were not strictly related to the leaders' ideological positions. This result supports the hypothesis that populist style is less and less connected to the right/left political cleavage, but rather the result of a varied combination of gradations that mix different individual aspects of the leader's political communication style.
Featuring a longitudinal, structural study of European party and citizen activity on Instagram between 2012 and 2018, this article outlines the overarching changes in the ways that Instagram has been ...employed for political party communication. Differentiating between populist and non-populist political parties, the results indicate that much like for other platforms such as Facebook, the former category of parties enjoy higher amounts of citizen engagement than their non-populist competitors. Detailing the uses of different types of posts by the two types of political actors, the study provides insights into how political parties have adopted and used Instagram from 2012 and onward.
In this article, the introduction to a special International Journal of Press/Politics (IJPP) issue on populism, we articulate and define populism as a communication phenomenon. We provide an ...overview of populist political communication research and its current foci. We offer a framework for ongoing research and set the boundary conditions for a new generation of research on populist political communication, with an aim to push the research agendas and design toward a more interactive, systematic, and in particular, comparative approach to the study of populist political communication.
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