Memeing the Candidates: Exploring Polarization and Incivility in Commenters’ Responses to Anti-Populist Memes during the 2023 Czech Presidential Elections

The relevance of visual images in political communication and a gradual move of political memes from subcultural to mainstream media environments have increased in recent years. This can be especially true for social networking sites and digital media outlets which give audiences an immediate access to a vast and diverse range of information and have an integral role in communicating political issues. In addition, these media allow people to engage with the content and interact with each other. However, online discussions are often marked by polarized nature of a debate, uncivil and impolite rhetoric. Although existing research has brought important insights into confrontational responses of audiences, we know less about how visual political images with memetic elements contribute to polarized online discussions. Against this background, this study investigates how political memes influence the use of uncivil and polarizing language in the user comments. Focusing on the case of the 2023 Czech presidential election, we explore whether and how specific frames associated with individual candidates in political memes – heroes, villains and fools - trigger rude and disrespectful reactions in online comments. In public discourse, the election was often presented as a fight for liberal democracy between populists vs. national unifiers, aligning with already present populist/anti-populist divide which emerged in the Czech politics before the 2021 general elections. While populist politicians tend to divide society into two homogenous groups – pure people and corrupt elites – as a part of their communication strategy, anti-populists attempt to position themselves as the opposite. In this context, we analyse how this divide, constructed through political memes in the digital media environment, drives the people's responses in online discussions. The main research question this study tackles is: To what extent does the presence of populist/anti-populist divide in political memes affect the use of uncivil and polarizing language in users' comments? We base the assumption of a relationship between the two on the idea that political memes are an efficient tool for conveying political criticism and expressing anti-populist discourses, which can, through social identities formation, invoke conflictive responses. Thus, they may serve as potent vehicle for both populism and anti-populism. While the populist narrative within memetic media has seen some significant attention already, the anti-populism, especially in the context of populism/anti-populism divide, has been underexplored. Its potential link to polarizing language occurring in online discussions also remains unclear. To empirically assess this link, we conduct a quantitative content analysis of political memes made by TMBK, a popular Czech collagist, on online news site Seznam Zpravy and social networking site Facebook, and associated comments posted by users under the articles/social media posts. We focus on time between October 2022 and April 2023, marking three-month periods around elections taking place in January 2023. This allows us to account for an influence of the frames within political memes on online discussions, and for cross-platform and pre- and post-election differences.