Inequality is a bigger threat to democracy than polarization.
In fact, polarization is often a sign of a healthy democracy beginning to confront systemic inequalities. And yet scholarship about technology and political communication often frames polarization as the biggest ongoing threat to democracy in the United States. This seeming contradiction, CITAP’s Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor argue, is about race.
In “A review and provocation: On polarization and plaftorms,” Kreiss and McGregor point out that the content of the poles in polarization is both important—and often ignored. Polarization does not account for the crucial differences between, for example, white supremacists and racial justice activists. Black Lives Matter and Stop the Steal are not equally good movements for democracy: as BLM activists explicitly calls for greater equality in a democratic society, Stop the Steal activists seek to overturn elections.
As Kreiss and McGregor put it, “polarization is… the necessary byproduct of the struggle to realize democracy in unequal societies.”
If political communication and media and technology scholars want to understand polarization, they cannot continue to do so from a power-disinterested lens. Polarization and systemic inequality are co-produced. And yet frequently the problems caused by polarization are blamed on those simply calling for justice. Ultimately, scholars frame struggles for justice as “polarizing” because:
our field’s conceptualizations of democracy are so thin, solidarity is so treasured, racial analytics are so rare, and historical memory is so short. It is not polarization, but racial repression that has been far more challenging and destabilizing to democracy over the past 300 years if looked at from a non-White perspective.
Political candidates draw on their personal identities to build social identity-based coalitions
In this chapter, Kreiss and McGregor focus on candidate and campaign strategic attempts at “identity ownership” (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2020) during primary election campaigns, especially through digital and social media. Identity ownership occurs when voters perceive a candidate as a plausible “prototype” (Jackson and Hogg, 2010) for a particular group. This prototypicality is marked by the perception that a candidate fits within and represents said group’s characteristics, norms, and values. To date, a robust body of literature has analyzed candidate “issue ownership” (e.g., Egan 2013), wherein politicians seek to align themselves with the issues their party is perceived by voters as having unique competency to address. Here the authors build on their previous work to analyze and empirically document how during primary elections candidates craft rhetoric and campaigns create communications that attempt to make some identities salient in the minds of voters, align candidates and their platforms with particular intrapartisan social identities, and craft and “extend” their own identities for electoral gain. Their argument is that through communication, and especially given the affordances of digital and social media that facilitate speaking to narrow slices of the electorate (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2018), candidates and campaigns strive to construct and convey the identities of the groups of constituents they seek to represent, including conveying information about the policies they will pursue through the lens of appealing to these particular social groups.
When covering elections at a time when their legitimacy is being undermined, journalists need to follow these crucial steps
As we count down to Election Day in the U.S., November 3, 2020, we find ourselves at a dangerous moment for democracy. As scholarly experts in politics and media, we draw on research from our field to offer practical, nonpartisan, evidence-based recommendations to journalists covering the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We hope these recommendations—based on decades of research into electoral processes, news coverage, and public opinion—support the important work journalists are doing to cover the election and safeguard democracy. We recommend journalists:
- Deny a platform to anyone making unfounded claims
- Put voters and election administrators at the center of elections
- Balance WHO as well as what gets covered
- Make quality coverage more widely accessible to expand publics for news
- Publicize your plans to call the election and do not make premature declarations
- Develop and use state- and local-level expertise to provide locally-relevant information
- Distinguish between legitimate, evidence-based challenges to vote counts and illegitimate ones that are intended to delay or call into question accepted procedures
- In the event of a contested or unclear outcome, don’t use social media to fill gaps in institutionally credible and reliable election information
- Cover an uncertain or contested election through a “democracy-worthy” frame
- Recognize that technology platforms have an important role to play
- Embrace existing democratic institutions
- Help Americans understand the roots of unrest
- Uphold democratic norms
- Use clear definitions for actions and actors and provide coverage appropriate to those definitions
- Do not give a platform to individuals or groups who call for violence, spread disinformation, or foment racist ideas.