by jpitney | Apr 29, 2022 | Civility, Congress, Polarization, Social Media
Melanie Mason at LAT: It’s not your imagination. Political discourse on Twitter really has grown meaner in recent years, according to a new study. The research, published Thursday in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that the level of...
by jpitney | Apr 19, 2022 | Polarization, Violence
Meet the Press, April 17, 2022: CHUCK TODD: You got death threats for voting for infrastructure spending. REP. FRED UPTON: I did. CHUCK TODD: You played these voicemails. We played these voicemails. REP. FRED UPTON: That’s why I’m here today. CHUCK TODD:...
by jpitney | Mar 27, 2022 | Deliberation, Polarization, Social Media
Nathan Gardels at Noema: The splinternet has predictably evolved into wars among platforms armed with predisposed views of reality that resist external checks on perceptions. As Claire Webb writes in Noema, epistemes or paradigms determine how information is...
by jpitney | Feb 6, 2022 | Bipartisanship, Civility, Congress, Polarization
Jim Saksa at Roll Call: At first blush, Reps. Joe Wilson and Dan Kildee don’t seem to have much in common. Wilson, a Republican, represents a mostly rural patch of inland South Carolina, while Democrat Kildee’s district of factory towns runs along the Lake Huron...
by jpitney | Jan 19, 2022 | Mass Media, Polarization
Steven W. Webster, Elizabeth C. Connors, and Betsy Sinclair have written a study titled “The Social Consequences of Political Anger.” The abstract: A functioning democracy relies on social interactions between people who disagree—including listening to...
by jpitney | Jan 13, 2022 | Polarization, Violence
Political scientist Jay Ulfelder at The Harvard Gazette: What really worries me is we absolutely have seen the radicalization of one of the major political parties in the U.S., both in terms of the political ideas it’s putting forward, but also, its embrace of...
