Digital media, political polarization and challenges to democracy

It was with these reflections that W. Lance Bennett (University of Washington) opened his public lecture ‘Who Are the People’ (Bennett, 2017a), which was broadcast by the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) as part of an international symposium on ‘Digital Media, Political Polarization, and Challenges to Democracy’ hosted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of York. The same symposium also gave rise to this special issue of ‘Information, Communication and Society’, which consists of six selected articles based on papers presented at the conference. Held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna from 21 to 22 September 2017 the symposium brought together social scientists from 20 countries and four continents to address the complex interplay between democracy, political participation, political polarization, and the new media environment or as Michael X. Delli Carpini (Walter H. Annenberg Dean at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania) has termed it, the new ‘media regime’. In his keynote speech, Delli Carpini argued that, from a historical perspective, distinct ‘media regimes’ emerge over time, on the back of economic, political, cultural, and technological changes, and that each regime is associated with different notions of free speech, a free press, democratic citizenship, civic engagement, and the responsibility to participate in the political process. The problem is that we are familiar with the rules and norms of the previously dominant broadcast-based regime, we cannot know with any certainty what is most beneficial or most problematic about the emerging new regime (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011). While the conference itself had a much broader focus, encompassing a range of topics from theoretical reflection on the changing dynamics of democratic processes and political communication to empirical studies on the radicalization of public debates and campaigns, nationalism, (right-wing) populism, and hate speech, the present special issue focuses on the interplay between social media, political polarization, and civic engagement. It also considers what needs to be done to ensure the democratic character of the