Polarization and Online Political Discourse

Over recent years scholarly attention has been devoted to political polarization, over Brexit in the UK, Trump’s election in the US, Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, as well as many other domestic agendas surrounding economic policy, policies on immigration and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Common to much of this research is the argument that digital platforms are both a cause of polarisation while also providing ways for understanding the issues and positions on which people become polarized. Social media platforms are spaces where users can become involved in arguments on issue positions, but they also provide a means for selective exposure, filter bubbles and echo chambers to form around single viewpoints. These can be the result of political party, campaign organisation or ordinary user actions, but can also be fuelled by non-human actors this is particularly problematic considering the growing use of bots to influence online political discussions and exacerbate political polarization (e.g., Yan et al. 2020). The combination of the rise of populism, the use of social media to spread polarising rhetoric, and the traction this rhetoric gains among users lead to serious concerns about the impact of social media on the health of democracies. Nevertheless, many of these arguments are still disputed and the effects of online media remain unclear, as extant empirical research has pointed to contradicting conclusions on many occasions concerning the determinants of the style of discourse (Woolley & Howard 2018) as well as the impact of exposure (Lilleker & Koc-Michalska 2017). Research has also suggested the importance of thinking about polarization beyond partisanship (e.g., Fisher et al 2013; Lauka et al. 2018; Guan et al. 2020); that there are exposure effects (Salgado 2019); conversation effects (e.g., Pattie and Johnston 2016) and network effects (e.g., Kearney 2019); and that context matters, namely that the intensity of polarization (e.g., Urman 2019) and the ways in which it is expressed online (Rossini 2020) varies greatly from one country to another and very likely also from one platform to another (Kreiss et al. 2018). By engaging with these debates and encouraging further empirical and theoretical research on the subject, our workshop aims to expand the set of actors studied to include a wider variety of actors than political leaders and political parties, including for example a range of campaign organisations, social and political movements, foreign actors as well as ordinary users, and thus contribute to a better understanding of the conditions under which online political discourse and participation boosts polarization and affects offline politics. In studying discourse on these platforms we can analyse the way in which people express themselves, engage with diverse perspectives and argue across political divides, but also how people avoid or confront those whom they disagree with.