Information, Communication & Society

ISSN: 1369-118X (Print) 1468-4462 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20

Digital media, political polarization and challenges

to democracy

Maren Beaufort

To cite this article: Maren Beaufort (2018) Digital media, political polarization and
challenges to democracy, Information, Communication & Society, 21:7, 915-920, DOI:
10.1080/1369118X.2018.1451909

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1451909

Published online: 20 Mar 2018.

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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2018
VOL. 21, NO. 7, 915–920
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1451909

INTRODUCTION

Digital media, political polarization and challenges to

democracy
Maren Beaufort
Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Wien, Austria

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 9 March 2018; Accepted 9 March 2018

Today democracy is under attack and there are many points in which it is weak and vul-
nerable to those attacks. In almost every democracy citizens are losing confidence and trust
in parties and in governments. There are declines in news audiences and press readership.
In Europe only half of the citizens born after 1980 think that it is essential to live in a
democracy.

It was with these reflections that W. Lance Bennett (University of Washington) opened his
public lecture ‘Who Are the People’ (Bennett, 2017a), which was broadcast by the Austrian
Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) as part of an international symposium on ‘Digital Media,
Political Polarization, and Challenges to Democracy’ hosted by the Austrian Academy of
Sciences and the University of York.
The same symposium also gave rise to this special issue of ‘Information, Communi-
cation and Society’, which consists of six selected articles based on papers presented at
the conference. Held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna from 21 to 22 Sep-
tember 2017 the symposium brought together social scientists from 20 countries and four
continents to address the complex interplay between democracy, political participation,
political polarization, and the new media environment or as Michael X. Delli Carpini
(Walter H. Annenberg Dean at the Annenberg School for Communication, University
of Pennsylvania) has termed it, the new ‘media regime’. In his keynote speech, Delli Car-
pini argued that, from a historical perspective, distinct ‘media regimes’ emerge over time,
on the back of economic, political, cultural, and technological changes, and that each
regime is associated with different notions of free speech, a free press, democratic citizen-
ship, civic engagement, and the responsibility to participate in the political process. The
problem is that we are familiar with the rules and norms of the previously dominant
broadcast-based regime, we cannot know with any certainty what is most beneficial or
most problematic about the emerging new regime (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011).
While the conference itself had a much broader focus, encompassing a range of topics
from theoretical reflection on the changing dynamics of democratic processes and political
communication to empirical studies on the radicalization of public debates and cam-
paigns, nationalism, (right-wing) populism, and hate speech, the present special issue
focuses on the interplay between social media, political polarization, and civic engage-
ment. It also considers what needs to be done to ensure the democratic character of the

CONTACT Maren Beaufort maren.beaufort@oeaw.ac.at Institute for Comparative Media and Communication
Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Postgasse 7, 1010 Wien, Austria
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
916 M. BEAUFORT

new, and thus far largely unknown media regime and explores its potential to enhance and
undermine democracy.
The conference was marked by a unifying, invigorating, and captivating sense of a new
departure, underlined by a mutual feeling of social responsibility. In this spirit, the various
theoretical reflections and empirical studies presented at the conference ultimately
revolved around the highly topical and urgent question, ‘What is to be done?’ However
fragmentary any answer to this question must be, as W. Lance Bennett noted, it will on
the one hand have to set out from the fact that political polarization cannot be grasped
in isolation from its entanglement with neoliberal interests; on the other, it will have to
address the overarching question, ‘Who are the people?’ i.e., the question of democratic
sovereignty (Bennett, 2017b) . This question calls for far more than a simple examination
of populism as today’s allegedly central political problem. As Bennett affirms, ‘It’s rather a
question that gets to the actual survival of democracy itself’ (Bennett, 2017a). Against this
backdrop, the conference saw discussions of a range of approaches based primarily on
analyses of the dynamic interplay between changing conceptions of democracy, changing
forms of political participation, and changing media usage behaviour. There is a clear evi-
dence of a transition toward a more participatory, commons-based understanding of citi-
zenship, particularly among young people, a transition that serves to shift the focus from
ensuring system performance (via voting and party membership) to supporting the system
as such. This transition needs to be understood in relation to the ways in which digitally
mediated communication influences – and perhaps organizes – our personal relationship
to society and public life (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Political actors and researchers
therefore have to confront the challenge of how to manage this contemporary shift
from established structures of representative democracy – with their group-based identi-
ties and mainstream issues – toward a wider repertoire of personalized political experience
and individual motivated concerns within a digitally networked society marked by an
increasingly participatory understanding of democracy (Seethaler & Beaufort, 2017).
The present issue aims to reflect the various multidisciplinary perspectives that shaped
the conference discussions. It contains both innovative theoretical interventions and
empirically grounded research that addresses the interplay between social media, political
polarization, and civic engagement in very different countries with varying degrees of
democratization, diverse media environments, and different cultural specificities. Both
the three Western and three non-Western contributions to the issue share a common
aspiration to understand the (anti-) democratic potential of the new media environment.
The issue opens with a much-discussed topic in current social debates. In their proof of
concept study, ‘Parametrizing Brexit: Mapping Twitter Political Space to Parliamentary
Constituencies’, Marco Bastos and Dan Mercea aim to validate the use of social media sig-
nals as a means of modelling the ideological coordinates of the Brexit debate. They find
that their model explains 41% of the variance in the referendum vote and show that the
referendum outcome can primarily be explained by outrage at material inequality and a
nationalistic shift. The authors conclude with a discussion of the conceptual and methodo-
logical challenges involved in signal processing social media data to measure public
opinion. As they see it, the strength of their approach lies not so much in its capacity
to generate predictions, but in the possibilities, it offers for the exploration of ongoing
developments, which would otherwise require the extensive, continuous, and expensive
use of traditional survey methodologies. While this first article focuses on the
 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 917

methodological possibilities of the ongoing analysis of social media content in the social
science, the authors of the following two contributions focus on this content itself. They
consider the extent to which the rise of social media as a dominant force in news distri-
bution has led to the stronger isolation of different outlooks through filter bubbles from
algorithmic filtering and echo chambers that arise in information environments domi-
nated by like-minded people, as well as assessing the consequences of such developments.
In ‘Facebook News and (De)Polarization: Reinforcing Spirals in the 2016 US Election’,
Michael Beam, Myiah Hutchens, and Jay Hmielowski offer a theoretical and empirical fra-
mework for the relationship between social media usage, partisan news exposure, and atti-
tude formation (including affective polarization, depolarization, and homeostasis), by
revealing a depolarization process that obeys a model of reinforcing spirals. In order to
move beyond correlational relationships, they use 3-wave panel data from the 2016 US
Presidential campaign, to show that Facebook message use is related to a moderate
over-time depolarization spiral and that people who use Facebook for news are likely to
be confronted with both pro-attitudinal and counter-attitudinal messages. They find no
evidence of a partisan reinforcing spiral that would lead to increased affective polarization.
On the basis of previous research that found that people are more likely to engage in coun-
ter-attitudinal exposure and information processing when they receive personalized social
and algorithmic recommendations (Messing & Westwood, 2014), the authors contend
that the depolarization effects they observed are primarily driven by users encountering
counter-attitudinal news, especially incidentally, on Facebook. The study therefore indi-
cates that Facebook news may not be responsible for rising citizen polarization. Further-
more, the findings debunk the theoretical links between social and algorithmic news
recommendations on social media. This is also the starting point for the following
study, which considers the extent to which the algorithms used to generate news rec-
ommendations allow for content diversity. In ‘Do Not Blame It on the Algorithm: An
Empirical Assessment of Multiple Recommender Systems and their Impact on Content
Diversity’, Damian Trilling, Judith Möller, Natali Helberger and Bram van Es examine
the effect of multiple recommender systems on different diversity dimensions and find
that all of the recommendation logics in question generate a rather diverse set of rec-
ommendations that are on a par with those made by human editors. They also show
that basing recommendations on user histories can substantially increase topic diversity
within a recommendation set. On the one hand, then, the results of both studies speak
against the idea that different political outlooks have become more strongly isolated
from one another due to filter bubbles and echo chambers. On the other hand, they
point to very specific filtering and acquisitional patterns in use among social networks,
which fundamentally differ from those in traditional media environments. These differ-
ences should not be underestimated in terms of their impact on engagement and mobil-
ization and require further research.
They can also be seen in the fact that online social networks are regarded as more sup-
portive environments for women than traditional media environments, where previous
research has shown that male politicians receive greater coverage (Bystrom, Robertson,
& Banwart, 2001; Joiner et al., 2016). The extent to which these newer environments
can also help to challenge long-held notions concerning the media inferiority of female
politicians is considered by Moran Yarchi and Tal Samuel-Azran in their ‘Women Poli-
ticians Are More Engaging: Male Versus Female Politicians’ Ability to Generate User
918 M. BEAUFORT

Engagement on Social Media During an Election Campaign’. Yarchi and Samuel-Azran

examine whether social media offer a more equal platform for female politicians to gen-
erate user engagement and mobilize their supporters than traditional media. Taking the
2015 Israeli election campaign as a case study, the authors examine female and male poli-
ticians’ social media posts with respect to their content and the number of ‘likes’ and
‘shares’ they received. They conclude that social media offer greater opportunities for
female politicians to promote themselves and raise their status in the political power-
play. While this study focuses on the potential of social media in political public relations
and voters’ mobilization, the next contribution addresses their role in facilitating bottom-
up social engagement.
Do different social media usage types correspond to different forms and levels of
engagement and mobilization? In their ‘Commitment in the Cloud? Social Media Partici-
pation in the [Taiwanese] Sunflower Movement’, Yuan Hsiao and Yunkang Yang inves-
tigate this question in relation to the commitment of social media participants in
digitally enabled protests. They find that the commitment of so-called ‘cloud activists’
(who operate exclusively online during a movement) is at least on par with most offline
participants with respect to their identification with the movement and their efficacy
within it. This finding contradicts the traditional notion that only offline participation
involves a high level of commitment and suggests that commitment can be exhibited in
online forms through sustained or highly intensive organizing activities that may enable
(offline) movements to persist. The activities of ‘cloud activists’ go far beyond those of
mere clicktivists (i.e., those who engage in online peer production) and such activists
might be regarded as ‘virtual connective leaders’. Their use of social media is negatively
associated with offline participation, indicating a non-linear relationship between social
media usage and offline participation. In contrast to previous studies, the authors find
that social media usage serves to increase offline participation only among low and med-
ium level social media users. In general, the authors show that the virtual space consists of
different types of actors, whose interrelated usage patterns are non-linear with respect to
different forms and levels of engagement and mobilization.
The forms taken by such usage patterns in digital social movements in authoritarian
states and the ways in which they contribute to or even enable pro-democracy activism
are addressed in the issue’s final contribution, entitled ‘Counter-Surveillance and Alterna-
tive New Media in Turkey’. Here, Bora Ataman and Baris Coban discuss opposing con-
ceptions of surveillance culture and offensive and defensive counter-surveillance tactics
in the context of an alternative new media landscape. Ataman and Coban describe how
this alternative, independent, critical, and investigative new media landscape has devel-
oped away from the traditional mainstream media environment and has come to form
a kind of counter-surveillance ‘institution’. They make clear that it is only through social
media networks – due to their structural characteristics (low access threshold, speed of dis-
semination, temporal, and local flexibility) and their philosophy (involving anonymity and
the possibility of avoiding and changing identifying features, free from formal constraints)
– that such a form of counter-surveillance can arise and be maintained. The authors
ascribe activists a key role in exposing undemocratic activities. The usage patterns they
describe reflect the various actor types elaborated in the previous contribution, along
with their interrelations with respect to online and offline activities. In addition, they indi-
cate the particular security demands that have to be taken into account where digital
 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 919

footprints are concerned (Sambrook, 2016) when gathering, producing, and disseminating
news (that is considered illegal) in the public debate.
Editing this special issue and collaborating on it with so many committed people has
been a pleasure and a privilege.
This collection developed out of the aforementioned Vienna 2017 symposium, which
was organized by Brian D. Loader (Department of Sociology, University of York), Josef
Seethaler, and myself (Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies, Aus-
trian Academy of Sciences and the University of Klagenfurt). Nevertheless, the articles in
this special issue do not simply represent the proceedings of the 2017 conference. All of the
papers were revised and passed through a double-blind peer-review process and multiple
rounds of revisions. I am now delighted to present these six exceptional studies.
I would therefore like to express my deepest gratitude to all the contributors to this
special issue for their thought-provoking and insightful contributions. I would also like
to thank the anonymous reviewers who, despite the short turn-around time, offered gen-
erous and constructive feedback to the authors. I am very happy that this collection is
appearing as a special issue of ‘Information, Communication and Society’. Many thanks
to Sarah Shrive Morrison and Brian D. Loader from the University of York, and Josef
Seethaler from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for their valuable help during the editing
process. I am especially indebted to W. Lance Bennett for our inspiring discussions during
the conference – and that they will continue. Last but not least I owe particular thanks to
Marlene Gsenger and Valentina Dopona from the local organizing committee, the Kapsch
AG for generously funding the conference, and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation for
the pleasant cooperation.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Maren Beaufort is a junior scientist at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication
Studies (CMC) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt.
Her research interests include social media, political participation, media effects, and media literacy.
She participates in the European Commission’s ‘Media Pluralism Monitor’. Her PhD thesis is con-
cerned with ‘media performance and democracy’[email: maren.beaufort@oeaw.ac.at].

References
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920 M. BEAUFORT

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