Dissonance from the Perspective of Agonistic Pluralism: A Study of Political Fragmentation on Facebook during the 2016 Austrian Presidential Election

ABSTRACT

Contemporary public debates are often characterized by structural and substantial dissonances. This paper is concerned with normative and empirical evaluations of these dissonances and makes contributions on both levels. We argue that agonistic pluralism provides an insightful, yet often dismissed, theoretical perspective on the matter of political fragmentation. On the empirical level, we exemplify these considerations against the backdrop of the 2016 Austrian presidential elections and propose a corresponding measurement approach for political fragmentation. A combined network analysis and automated content analysis of comments on Facebook pages affiliated with political parties results in the following main findings: First, when looking at comments between different parties, fragmentation is at a low level at the beginning of the election campaign but increases over time. Second, degrees of fragmentation vary to a great extent between different parties. Third, offensive speech is one purpose for communication between political groups but not the main one.

KEYWORDS:

• Dissonant public spheres
• radical democratic theory
• political fragmentation
• social network analysis
• automated content analysis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Please note that politometer is no longer active as a social media observatory.

2. We computed the modularity for the network available from Berenhaut et al. (2016) using political orientation as a partition parameter.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [01|S20049].

Notes on contributors

Stephan Schlögl

Stephan Schlögl is a PhD student at the University of Passau, Germany. His research and teaching interests include political communication in social media, climate change communication, public sphere theory and computational social sciences.

Moritz Bürger

Moritz Bürger is a PhD student at the University of Passau, Germany. He teaches about and researches the fields of science communication, political communication and quantitative research methods.

Sudharsana Kannan

Sudharsana Kannan is a research associate in the Junior Research Group CAROLL (Computational Rhetoric for Social Media and Law) at the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Passau, Germany.

Philip Dietrich

Philip Dietrich is a PhD student at the University of Passau, Germany. He teaches about and researches the fields of political communication, social media communication and media ethics.

Jelena Mitrović

Jelena Mitrović leads the Junior Research Group CAROLL (Computational Rhetoric for Social Media and Law) which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and affiliated to the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Passau, Germany.