The Discourse Polarisation stream addresses one of the major domains of polarisation that have been identified by the Australian Laureate Fellowship “Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate”. The other major domains are Audience Polarisation and News Polarisation.
Understanding how groups conceptualise and communicate about different topics, their discourses, is a central part of understanding the dynamics and drivers of polarisation and partisanship in society. In the Laureate project, our interest in discourses is related to how discourses themselves can be polarised and polarising, and how they are shaped by human interactions as a part of individual as well as group identities and community building.
To understand discourses, we need to understand both how discourses shape and are simultaneously shaped by human interactions; as such, discourse research can be applied to a very wide range of problems. Within the Laureate project, our focus is on how discourses function online in relation to polarisation and partisanship. Thinking of discourses as how we conceptualise and communicate about a topic shows both the scope of this kind of research, and points to why it is a central part of understanding the drivers of polarisation and partisanship.
Within this research stream, we focus on defining, tracking and understanding how relevant discourses play out on social media. We focus on issues and events (e.g. elections, The Voice to Parliament, the football World Cup), and analyse social media posts and trends both at large scale and through closer reading, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Problem statement and goals:
- To further our knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms and drivers of partisanship and polarisation in online public discourse, and thereby also understand if, when, and how these discourses, as well as their effects, constitute a problem for democracy.
- Contribute to the understanding of when and how discourses become polarised and de-polarised online, particularly on social media, and to move beyond the common left-right spectrum in our understanding of polarisation.
- To improve our understandings of polarisation, we focus on different aspects of the concept, examine how these are expressed in public discourse, and how they grow or diminish over time. Our primary focus is on the role of affect and interpretation between polarised or polarising groups and discourses.
- We will advance the development of methods to investigate discourses in three main ways: (a) considering different languages in the same analytical framework; (b) further improving methods for large-scale text and content analysis; and (c) identifying discursive, textual and linguistic elements that appear in a context of political polarisation, and what is the interplay between these different elements.
The work of the Discourse research stream has a multi-focal approach. Our initial case studies have been comparative across nations, using elections as a point of comparison. Within this, we are looking at affective communication on Facebook from political leaders across four nations, particularly seeing if, how, and how much leaders might construct in- and out-groups as a technology of affective polarisation for political gain. Alongside this, we are examining framing of contentious issues by the candidates in the 2022 Australian federal election on Twitter.
Another part of our work focuses on the appearance (or not) of political content within third spaces, where there is a potential for depolarisation. We are again comparing across nations and using the 2022 World Cup as our case, this time using a cross-platform selection of data.
DMRC research program
This project contributes to the research within the following DMRC research programs:
DMRC research groups
This project contributes to the research within the following DMRC research groups:
Project team