Incivility in Political Debate and News Media: A Longitudinal Investigation in Belgium (1985-2019)

Today concerns are raised repeatedly about the alleged rise of incivility in politics and in the news media (Dryzek et al., 2019). Trends such as the growing success of populist leaders and the increasing mediatization of politics have been argued to stimulate this increase, yet scientific evidence for these claims is lacking, especially in a non-US context. This study aims to contribute to this in the following ways. First, we investigate the prevalence and evolution of incivility in televised election debates over the past 35 years in Belgium and expect politicians’ use of uncivil communication to be on the rise. Election debates generally attract large audiences as they are typically one of the big “look-forward-to moments” during an election campaign. In these debates party leaders directly interact to make their policy positions clear, making it an ideal venue to investigate uncivil attacks politicians express towards their opponents. Moreover, we expect several factors to affect the prevalence of incivility and therefore study how factors such as populist presence and debate format affect the amount of incivility in debates. Second, besides politicians’ use of incivility, it is frequently argued that the news media tend to over-report uncivil attacks politicians express towards their opponents in political debates rather than substantively covering the content of the debate (Benoit & Currie, 2001). This could have far-reaching consequences as post-debate coverage does not only reach people who watched the debates. Those who did not watch the debates can still accidentally or intentionally be exposed to post-debate news coverage. As citizens’ increasing exposure to incivility might have harmful effects and spur distrust towards politicians, politics and the press (Cappella, 2002), it is important to gather insight into the prevalence and evolution of incivility in the news media as well. These insights are gathered by conducting a comprehensive and systematic quantitative content analysis of 4680 speech acts in 26 Belgian general election debates over the course of the past 35 years (1985-2019), and 200 written newspaper articles covering these debates over the past 20 years (2000-2019). Preliminary results indicate that there is no steady increase in incivility over time. Incivility rather seems to be cyclical and context-dependent, both in the debates and in post-debate coverage. Interestingly, while the amount of incivility in news articles follows the exact same trend as the amount of incivility in the debates, there is an average gap of 15% between the two, confirming the expectation of over-reporting incivility in the news media. These results demonstrate the importance of taking the total communication environment into account when analyzing incivility in political communication. References: Dryzek, J., Bächtiger, A., Chambers, S., Cohen, J., Druckman, J., Felicetti, A., … Warren, M. (2019). The Crisis of Democracy and the Science of Deliberation. Science, 36(6432), 1144-1146. Benoit, W., & Currie, H. (2001). Inaccuracies in Media Coverage of the 1996 and 2000 Presidential Debates. Argumentation and Advocacy, 38(1), 28-39. Cappella, J. (2002). Cynicism and Social Trust in the New Media Environment. Journal of Communication, 52(1), 229-241.