The Shifting Boundaries of Inclusion: A Comparative Study of Minoritized Group Coverage.

In different European contexts political discourses have increasingly shifted toward conservative, exclusionary and illiberal positions, reshaping the conditions under which minoritized groups (MGs) are represented in the public sphere (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024). For this study we focus on Poland and Germany as two countries that illustrate two distinct trajectories within this broader trend: Poland is currently re-liberalizing while Germany faces the rise of an illiberal political party. Exploring the implications of illiberalism for communicative spaces, recent scholarship has articulated the term “illiberal public sphere” as a space where traditional and new media promote and amplify illiberal actors and views. In these contexts, news media become central sites in which inclusion and exclusion are negotiated or challenged, influencing the social belonging, legitimacy, or rights of MGs. News media influences how MGs enter public debate, and the platforming of exclusionary views has been found to impact MGs’ lives. Despite the importance of the media in this dynamic, research has focused mainly on the U.S. and the U.K. and analysis tends to span short time periods and singular media types. Comparisons of MGs' representations between countries are not common, and neither are between-group comparisons. To address these gaps, this paper asks the following question: How do minoritized groups’ news media representations evolve amidst illiberalism trajectories? to answer it, it will follow the sub questions 1) How do minoritized groups representations differ between German and Polish news media? 2) Are there patterns in the representation of minoritized groups across 10 years? and 3) How do broadsheet and tabloid outlets differ in the extent to which they platform or challenge exclusionary portrayals of MGs? This paper uses computational text analysis to compare the representation of groups considered polarizing (migrants, LGBTQ+ people) and non-polarizing (disabled people) in Polish and German broadsheet and tabloid newspapers of different political leaning over ten years. We analyze salience, stance and topic distribution of articles about MGs because these aspects are tied to their visibility and their positioning as targets of support or opposition, contributing to dynamics of inclusion or exclusion. The study examines the conditions under which MGs become visible and how their portrayal varies across different media formats in countries with illiberal leaders who are platformed in their public spheres. By tracing changes in the salience, stance and topic distribution of different MGs over time, the paper offers empirical leverage for understanding if and how illiberal views become articulated in news coverage. (working paper) Introduction Across Europe, the increasing popularity of conservative political figures and the growing normalization of far-right ideologies have transformed the conditions of public discourse (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024). Within these shifting discursive environments, minoritized groups (MGs) are recurrent targets of othering processes that question their social belonging. Othering processes are discursive practices through which powerful groups define subordinated groups as inferior or problematic, affirming their own superiority and shaping the identities of those they marginalize (Spivak, 1985; Riggins, 1997; Schwalbe, 2000; Schwalbe et al., 2000; Jensen, 2011). While existing scholarship has emphasized the role of right-wing and populist political leaders in producing exclusionary discourses (Mudde, 2019; Wodak, 2015), this paper advances a complementary argument; exclusionary narratives constitute an enduring symbolic reservoir of meanings about differences between social groups that illiberal political figures can strategically amplify and rearticulate through media communication. To conceptualize how this process unfolds, we situate our research within the evolving notion of the illiberal public sphere, understood as a communicative space where traditional and digital media normalize or platform illiberal perspectives and restrict pluralistic debate (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024). Media organizations in these contexts are not passive arenas of information exchange but discursive institutions that shape the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through representational practices (Hall, 1997; Van Dijk, 1991). We conceptualize media representation as comprising three interrelated dimensions: visibility (amount of coverage), evaluative orientation (stance toward a group), and thematic embedding (the contexts within which groups are discursively situated). Taken together, these dimensions capture how media contribute to the normalization, contestation, or silencing of exclusionary projects within illiberalizing public spheres These dimensions might differ depending on the trajectories of illiberalism in a given state and the type of news outlet that mediates political conflict. Illiberalism trajectories refer to the direction and intensity of change in democratic quality over time, ranging from processes of illiberal consolidation to phases of democratic re-liberalization (Bozóki & Hegedűs, 2018; Kornai, 2015). News outlets vary in how they position themselves within these trajectories: some align more closely with illiberal actors, while others sustain liberal–democratic norms of pluralism and minority protection. This research is guided by the question: How do minoritized groups’ news media representations evolve amidst illiberalism trajectories? Comparing Polish and German newspapers provides contrast for examining how representations of MGs evolve under differing trajectories of illiberalism: Poland represents a case of democratic re-liberalization following a period of illiberal consolidation (Sadurski, 2025), while Germany illustrates a liberal democracy encountering the increasing influence of an illiberal party within public debate (Decker, 2024). Media outlets also play different roles in public discourse: tabloids emphasize infotainment and soft news, with reliance on headlines, visuals, and sensationalism. Broadsheets are positioned as the opposite, typically more serious, focused on hard news, analysis, and traditional reporting (Bastos, 2019). These structural and ideological characteristics make them crucial sites for understanding how the media’s role as a democratic actor varies across systems and audience orientations. Empirically, the study applies computational text analysis to a 13-year (2012-2024) corpus of Polish and German newspapers to examine cross-national, between group, and between media differences in the representation of MGs. We analyze groups positioned at differing levels of societal polarization: migrants and LGBTQ+ people as highly politicized minorities, and disabled people as a low-polarization reference group, to assess how liberal and illiberal contexts and media types interact with media representation. Specifically, using salience analysis, stance analysis and topic modelling, we measure variation in salience, stance, and topic distribution as operational indicators of the visibility, evaluative orientation, and thematic embedding of MGs, respectively. Theoretically, this study brings research on the illiberal public sphere into dialogue with work on mediated othering and symbolic boundary drawing. It argues that the representational treatment of minoritized groups offers a sensitive barometer of how far illiberal projects penetrate mainstream media, and of the capacity of journalistic institutions to uphold inclusive democratic norms. By integrating cross-national and cross-media comparisons within a longitudinal design, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on the mediatization of illiberal discourses and the role of journalistic institutions in sustaining or contesting democratic declines. It extends existing research on the symbolic construction of otherness in the European media sphere by empirically tracing how illiberal discourses are articulated or resisted through news representations of minoritized groups. Introduction Across Europe, the increasing popularity of conservative political figures and the growing normalization of far-right ideologies have transformed the conditions of public discourse (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024). Within these shifting discursive environments, minoritized groups (MGs) are recurrent targets of othering processes that question their social belonging. Othering processes are discursive practices through which powerful groups define subordinated groups as inferior or problematic, affirming their own superiority and shaping the identities of those they marginalize (Spivak, 1985; Riggins, 1997; Schwalbe, 2000; Schwalbe et al., 2000; Jensen, 2011). While existing scholarship has emphasized the role of right-wing and populist political leaders in producing exclusionary discourses (Mudde, 2019; Wodak, 2015), this paper advances a complementary argument; exclusionary narratives constitute an enduring symbolic reservoir of meanings about differences between social groups that illiberal political figures can strategically amplify and rearticulate through media communication. To conceptualize how this process unfolds, we situate our research within the evolving notion of the illiberal public sphere, understood as a communicative space where traditional and digital media normalize or platform illiberal perspectives and restrict pluralistic debate (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024). Media organizations in these contexts are not passive arenas of information exchange but discursive institutions that shape the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through representational practices (Hall, 1997; Van Dijk, 1991). We conceptualize media representation as comprising three interrelated dimensions: visibility (amount of coverage), evaluative orientation (stance toward a group), and thematic embedding (the contexts within which groups are discursively situated). Taken together, these dimensions capture how media contribute to the normalization, contestation, or silencing of exclusionary projects within illiberalizing public spheres These dimensions might differ depending on the trajectories of illiberalism in a given state and the type of news outlet that mediates political conflict. Illiberalism trajectories refer to the direction and intensity of change in democratic quality over time, ranging from processes of illiberal consolidation to phases of democratic re-liberalization (Bozóki & Hegedűs, 2018; Kornai, 2015). News outlets vary in how they position themselves within these trajectories: some align more closely with illiberal actors, while others sustain liberal–democratic norms of pluralism and minority protection. This research is guided by the question: How do minoritized groups’ news media representations evolve amidst illiberalism trajectories? Comparing Polish and German newspapers provides contrast for examining how representations of MGs evolve under differing trajectories of illiberalism: Poland represents a case of democratic re-liberalization following a period of illiberal consolidation (Sadurski, 2025), while Germany illustrates a liberal democracy encountering the increasing influence of an illiberal party within public debate (Decker, 2024). Media outlets also play different roles in public discourse: tabloids emphasize infotainment and soft news, with reliance on headlines, visuals, and sensationalism. Broadsheets are positioned as the opposite, typically more serious, focused on hard news, analysis, and traditional reporting (Bastos, 2019). These structural and ideological characteristics make them crucial sites for understanding how the media’s role as a democratic actor varies across systems and audience orientations. Empirically, the study applies computational text analysis to a 13-year (2012-2024) corpus of Polish and German newspapers to examine cross-national, between group, and between media differences in the representation of MGs. We analyze groups positioned at differing levels of societal polarization: migrants and LGBTQ+ people as highly politicized minorities, and disabled people as a low-polarization reference group, to assess how liberal and illiberal contexts and media types interact with media representation. Specifically, using salience analysis, stance analysis and topic modelling, we measure variation in salience, stance, and topic distribution as operational indicators of the visibility, evaluative orientation, and thematic embedding of MGs, respectively. Theoretically, this study brings research on the illiberal public sphere into dialogue with work on mediated othering and symbolic boundary drawing. It argues that the representational treatment of minoritized groups offers a sensitive barometer of how far illiberal projects penetrate mainstream media, and of the capacity of journalistic institutions to uphold inclusive democratic norms. By integrating cross-national and cross-media comparisons within a longitudinal design, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on the mediatization of illiberal discourses and the role of journalistic institutions in sustaining or contesting democratic declines. It extends existing research on the symbolic construction of otherness in the European media sphere by empirically tracing how illiberal discourses are articulated or resisted through news representations of minoritized groups. State of the field European political discourses have increasingly adopted conservative, exclusionary, and illiberal positions, altering minoritized groups' (MGs) public sphere representations (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024). However, analyses of MG representation are frequently conducted in relation to crises or significant events (Irom et al., 2022; Walter & Glas, 2024) and thus do not analyze extensive time periods encompassing political transformations. Existing studies consistently find the prevalence of negative stereotypes and underrepresentation in news media (Arcimaviciene et al., 2018; Bleich & van der Veen, 2021; Bleich et al., 2021; Tukachinsky et al., 2015). At the same time, some evidence points to moments of solidarity and recognition of MGs’ social contributions (Beazer et al., 2024; Habes et al., 2024). Most scholarship on minoritized groups representation has focused on English speaking contexts such as the U.K. and the U.S. leaving much to explore regarding MGs portrayals across Europe. On the Polish and German contexts there are trends for the representation of polarizing (migrants, LGBTQ+) and non-polarizing groups (disabled people). The portrayal of migrants as a minoritized group in Poland has evolved from a predominantly negative framing with the Ukrainian crisis; Ukrainian refugees are portrayed positively as "war refugees," contrasting non-European migrants (Zawadzka-Paluektau, 2022). This holds true in the German coverage, where refugees from the Middle East are associated to threat frames in contrast with empathetic portrayals of Ukrainian refugees (Hoffmann & Hameleers, 2024). These dynamics position news media as national sites of inclusion/exclusion negotiation, where minoritized groups are assigned meanings in both positive and negative ways. This negotiation of social meaning can occur through negative rethoric about a group, such as the discourse about LGBTQ+ people in conservative Polish outlets (Woniak-Wrzesinska, 2024) but it can also be through omission, for example, German media erasing moments of LGBTQ solidarity at the 2022 World Cup (Tzanis, 2025). Dynamics of exclusion and inclusion are different for non-polarizing groups such as disabled people, whose visibility is lower. There is little research on german coverage of these groups, however, autism is frequently depicted in media through hierarchical types like "complicated boys" (Adlung, 2018). Disabled representations in Polish media emphasize Paralympic "supercrips" or victims (Wesoowska, 2024), while these traditional portrayals are challenged in social media (Struck-Peregoczyk & Leonowicz-Bukaa, 2023). Even though it is possible to understand specific trends in MGs representation in Poland and Germany from the existing literature, long term dynamics of MGs representation are under-researched, as are their comparative characteristics and their evolution alongside diverging political trajectories. This study fills these gaps by analyzing and comparing 12 years of MGs’ coverage in the main tabloid and broadsheet newspapers of Germany and Poland. Theoretical framework Media and the Public Sphere: Institutional Actor and Illiberal Mediator Within democratic theory, the media have traditionally been conceptualized as core institutions of the public sphere, facilitating deliberation, pluralism, and the circulation of arguments among citizens and elites (Habermas, 1989). In this sense, the press operates not merely as a tool transmitting information but as an actor that shapes communicative norms, defines legitimate discourse, and structures access to visibility in the political system. Through selection, framing, and amplification, media organizations function as gatekeepers mediating between state institutions, political elites, and the citizenry (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). In contexts marked by declining liberal-democratic norms, however, the media’s institutional role shifts. Scholarship on the illiberal public sphere (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024) conceptualizes this transformation as a structural reconfiguration in which both legacy and digital media facilitate the retrenchment of pluralism by privileging exclusionary or nationalist voices. Here, the limit between the media’s democratic and illiberal functions blurs because the communicative infrastructure that sustains liberal deliberation can be co-opted to normalize illiberal worldviews. This framework positions the media simultaneously as mirror and amplifier of political illiberalism, an institutional setting where contestations of belonging are mediated in asymmetrical ways. The public sphere then reflects and feeds the political system, reproducing symbolic hierarchies that influence policy agendas and legitimacy claims. An institutional approach to the public sphere allows us to analyze how journalistic formats (broadsheets vs. tabloids) and national contexts (liberal vs. illiberal) shape the conditions under which minoritized groups (MGs) become visible and how they are discursively positioned. Theory of Representation and Intergroup Threat Theory Building on cultural and media theory, the theory of representation (Hall, 1997; Luhmann, 2000) conceives media visibility as a key dimension of political inclusion. Visibility determines who can appear as a legitimate subject within public discourse and whose experiences remain absent or obscured. Representation entails presence (being covered) and definition (being defined through particular frames or associations). In this study, visibility is operationalized through salience, understood as the relative frequency and prominence of MGs in news content. By examining salience across time, country, and outlet type, we evaluate how different media institutions contribute to the symbolic inclusion or marginalization of MGs. This aligns with work that links representational visibility to processes of power reproduction within mediated publics: groups that achieve higher salience tend to become recognized political actors, while those rendered invisible remain structurally excluded. The intergroup threat theory (Stephan & Stephan, 2000) offers a framework for understanding how evaluative orientations toward out-groups shape social attitudes and policy preferences. Media coverage often articulates threats,symbolic (to values or identity) or realistic (to security or economic stability),as frames structuring the perception of MGs. These evaluative cues anchor how audiences interpret social divisions and political conflict. Analytically, this theory underpins the second dimension of representation: evaluative orientation, operationalized through stance analysis. Stance captures whether MGs are portrayed in supportive, neutral, or oppositional terms. Comparing stance across media types allows us to assess whether tabloids, often associated with affective populism, produce more adversarial evaluations than broadsheets, which historically claim adherence to liberal journalistic norms. Cross-national comparison similarly reveals whether illiberal communicative environments foster systematically negative portrayals of MGs. Illiberal Public Sphere: Thematic Embedding and Media Comparison The concept of the illiberal public sphere provides the macro-level lens connecting representation and ideology. It posits that illiberalism permeates communicative spaces not only through direct censorship or propaganda but through subtler mechanisms of agenda emphasis, discursive repetition, and topic linkage that embed exclusionary views into everyday news routines. This theoretical perspective informs the third dimension of representation: thematic embedding. By analyzing the topics and issue contexts in which MGs appear, we assess how illiberal communicative logics structure inclusion and exclusion. For instance, if migrants are predominantly covered within crime or security frames while disabled people appear largely in welfare or human-interest stories, these thematic distributions signal different forms of symbolic (de)legitimation. Comparing such patterns across broadsheet and tabloid media,and between countries experiencing varying degrees of illiberal pressure,allows us to map how the illiberal public sphere manifests in practice. Integrative Theoretical Model Taken together, the three frameworks articulate a multi-level model of media representation under conditions of democratic erosion. At the macro level, the illiberal public sphere theory situates the media within transforming democratic institutions. At the meso level, representation theory captures how media organizations construct visibility hierarchies. At the micro level, intergroup threat theory specifies the evaluative and thematic dimensions that translate ideology into sentiment. Integrating these levels enables the comparative analysis of mechanisms through which MGs are made visible, evaluated, and contextualized across different media systems. It also establishes a coherent bridge to the paper’s empirical strategy, in which salience, stance, and topic distribution are operational indicators of the broader communicative dynamics linking media structures to political illiberalism. Data and Methods The dataset comprises 225,500 news articles mentioning minoritized groups (MGs) published between 2012 and 2024 in the main German and Polish broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. Articles were retrieved from the Factiva and Lexis Nexis databases using a comprehensive, bilingual keyword list (Appendix 1) derived from prior research and validated by native speakers to capture context-specific terminology. The sample includes the leading broadsheets, Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita (Poland), and the main tabloids Bild and Fakt. This selection reflects theoretical debates on illiberal public spheres where media polarization, distrust, and hostility toward marginalized groups contribute to exclusionary discourses (Štětka & Mihelj, 2024). Focusing on both countries enables comparison between a consolidated democracy and a context with recent illiberal consolidation and re-liberalization. Within each, the contrast between broadsheets and tabloids allows assessment of how media format and ideology shape representations of politically polarized groups (migrants, LGBTQ+ people) compared to less politicized ones (disabled people). Article Collection and Salience Articles published between January 1, 2012, and December 31, 2024, were extracted to capture shifting political contexts and debates about MGs. MG-related keywords were derived from prior studies (Åkerlund, 2019; Bryson et al., 2018; Haller et al., 2006; Hinrichsen et al., 2012) and refined using the Rkeywords package (Palicki, 2023). Salience, operationalized as the number of articles containing these keywords, serves as a baseline indicator of visibility, reflecting agenda-setting dynamics (Cohen, 1963; McCombs & Shaw, 1972; McCombs & Stroud, 2014). This process yielded a full corpus of 225,500 articles. Because headlines and leads strongly shape interpretation (Ecker et al., 2014; Holsanova et al., 2006; Kiousis, 2004), we focused on articles centering MGs. We selected articles with MG-related keywords in either headlines or lead paragraphs resulting in a subset of 32,140 items. Topic Modeling Thematic patterns were examined using seeded topic modeling (SeededLDA). Topics were adapted from the Media Framing Dataset (Cuadrado et al., 2025) and assigned when topic probability exceeded 0.5, (intercoder reliability in progress at the time of this upload). Sentiment and Stance Analysis Nor perfiormed yet (Representational tone will be assessed through two steps. Sentiment analysis using a fine-tuned RoBERTa-base model to classify articles as positive, neutral, or negative on a –1 to 1 scale, with robustness checks ensuring stability across periods.) Stance analysis employs a transformer-based natural language inference (NLI) model to categorize articles as supportive, neutral, or oppositional, applying a confidence threshold of 0.45. (preliminary) Results Salience Figure 1. MGs salience across countries and media types The preliminary results of the salience analysis (Figure 1) show that between 2012 and 2021 the visibility of marginalized groups has gradually increased. In terms of media types, broadsheet newspapers have a higher percentage of articles mentioning MGs and of articles focused on MGs compared to tabloid newspapers. This distinction holds true for both German and Polish sources, with the difference that in the latter, visibility in both tabloids and broadsheets is lower for both articles mentioning MGs and articles focused on MGs, which are not visible in the graph given the small percentage they represent. Figure 2. Focus on MGs across countries and media types Regarding the distribution of articles focusing on marginalized groups, there are significant differences across categories. German broadsheets focus more on migrants as a marginalized group compared to German tabloids and their Polish counterparts. The latter have focused on the LGBTQ+ community as a group since 2019, and from that year onward, a high percentage of articles have covered this group. Polish tabloids focus primarily on migrants as a group. Coverage of people with disabilities, a non-polarizing group, varies across all sources but receives more attention from German tabloids. Topic Modelling Topic modeling results reveal patterns in the way each marginalized group is represented in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. Table 1 presents the five main topics for each group in both types of newspapers; it shows that, in the case of tabloids, these topics account for nearly all articles, whereas in broadsheets there is a lower concentration on each topic. Regarding the most prevalent topics by marginalized group, in tabloids migrants and LGBTQ+ (polarizing groups) share the same two topics with the highest percentage of articles. Table 1. Topic Modelling results for German newspapers As for the topics present across time (Appendix 1) they vary from group to group: for disabled people, topics like crime and punishment, policy, cultural, health and safety, and quality of life show the most enduring presence, each spanning between 2012 and 2024. In LGBTQ+ Coverage crime and punishment and cultural topics span all 12 active years, and fairness and equality 11. Coverage of Migrants Coverage has crime and punishment, morality, cultural, fairness and equality, and legality present as topics across all years, and public opinion, and politics are present in 9 years each. Tabloid coverage was more concentrated for each group. For disabled people public opinion is the topic that persists most enduringly over 8 years, followed by legality over 6. In LGBTQ+ coverage crime and punishment is the most prevalent topic (5 years) as it is for Migrants (8 years) followed by legality over 7 years. Discussion Following the preliminary salience analysis (Figure 1), there are asymmetries in minoritized groups’ (MGs) visibility that underscore the contested nature of representation in the public sphere. Visibility is the foundation for the creation of meaning in media (Hall, 1997) as it determines legitimate subjecthood. Broadsheets consistently surpass tabloids in MGs mentions and focused articles, affirming their role as journalistic institutions associated with quality reporting, platforming pluralism, while tabloids' lower salience can obscure minoritized experiences as a result of a limited coverage. This distinction holds across Germany and Poland, but German outlets surpass Polish counterparts, where MG-focused articles remain a minimal percentage of the total yearly publications for both broadsheets and tabloids. This suggests deeper structural omission of minoritized communities. Crucially, this absence predates illiberal leadership in Poland, which can be interpreted as pre-existing communicative hierarchies rendering MGs discursively invisible even before overt democratic erosion and amplifying their marginalization relative to Germany's liberal media system. However, in Germany there are differences across media types, with the type of representation varying between broadsheets and tabloid newspapers. While migrants are the most present groups in German broadsheets, tabloids emphasize disabled people. Polish tabloids prioritize migrants, and broadsheets shift to LGBTQ+ post-2019. Non-polarizing disabled people as the focus in tabloids challenges expectations of uniform exclusion, and highlights visibility asymmetries linked to media types. (Stance analysis results will complement this discussion providing information about the pairing of supportive, neutral or oppositional stance between each group, country and media type.) These differences between media types and groups are also reflected in the topic embeddings. Tabloids prioritize articles linked to crime and punishment for polarizing groups (46.77% migrants; 22.44% LGBTQ+), portraying them in threat associated contexts. In contrast, broadsheets present a more diverse coverage (politics 18.20% migrants; cultural 15.21% disabled), though enduring topics like crime and punishment span years across groups. While nearly all coverage is focused on limited topics for tabloid news, broadsheets' fragmentation allows for a more nuanced meaning association for MGs in general.( It is important to highlight that stance results will complement this analysis to add nuance to the understanding of MGs news coverage.) These findings show that low visibility and the topics associated to threats or illegality are centric themes that structurally limit the media inclusion of MGs, feeding symbolic hierarchies that entrench exclusion. Broadsheets mitigate this via higher visibility and pluralism, but shared enduring topics can suggest a subtle permeation of illiberal logics even in liberal outlets. From the multi-level model perspective, macro illiberal pressures can be reflected in meso-level representational practices, resulting in the type of coverage that is associated with micro-level threat evaluations. The completed research will incorporate the results of Polish data analysis for a cross-national comparison of evaluative stance and topic embedding of MGs across illiberal/liberal governmental trajectories, and emphasize on the key years for both the Polish illiberal leader and the German illiberal political party.