Online Political Incivility in Hungary. What is Beyond the Norm Violation Approach?

The study examines the changes in the norms of expressing political opinion in the below-the-line comments section of news media portals in Hungary between 2017 and 2019. Despite a large number of studies clearly indicating the increase of profanity, many aspects of the mechanisms involved in the political incivility on the Internet are still unclear. Moving beyond the politeness norm violation approach, we offer a mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative content analysis) research to map out the distribution of the uncivil written material in the user-generated content. We focus on the strict sense of political incivility such as name-calling, vulgarity, and swearing. By collecting data from the most read online news media portals, we put together the text corpus for political incivility in Hungary. We define keywords for different types of incivility and search for them within the comments either on the Facebook pages of the sampled outlets or in Disqus system. Our dictionary method is based on multiple rounds of linguistic and content analysis of detecting the most appropriate indicators to map the potentiality of incivility. Data suggest that the volume of political incivility in on the steady rise in Hungary so the new norms of online political communication have to be considered dynamically evolving, overwriting the conventional forms, making even the use of name-calling, vulgarity and swearing a common practice. Given the interpersonal context of online commentaries, targeted incivility is measured by tracing back who is verbally attacked. In order to test the spiralling effect with descriptive statistics, the paper addresses the question whether the comments with directed name-calling and obscene expressions receive more reaction from the users than comments without incivility. To do so, Hungary is an excellent case where the proliferation of vernacular and disrespectful language illustrates the rising tensions and anger in politics.