Identifying the Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation

Much of the research on polarisation still investigates the dynamics of polarisation without sufficiently defining and conceptualising the concept. This can lead to the conflation of different forms of polarisation in the design and findings of empirical studies; the over-diagnosis of problematic and pernicious forms of polarisation instead of mere disagreement and antagonism; and the unquestioned adoption of technologically determinist perspectives in the search for scapegoats and solutions.

Building on a systematic, crossdisciplinary review of the different forms of polarisation that have been proposed and identified in recent studies, this presentation argues for a better demarcation between these concepts in the study of political polarisation as a threat to democracy, and introduces destructive polarisation as a particularly pernicious form of polarisation that is distinguished from more ordinary and less problematic forms of polarisation by a number of distinct symptomatic features.

Drawing on the novel analytical approach of practice mapping, it illustrates these features and their consequences with a case study of the Australian referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in October 2023, which featured a particularly destructive campaign to polarise the Australian electorate.

Bio: Axel Bruns

Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current research focusses on the study of public communication in digital and social media environments, with particular attention to the dynamics of polarisation, partisanship, and problematic information, and their implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere; his work draws especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he posts on Mastodon as @snurb@aoir.social and on Bluesky as @snurb.info.