Political Incivility in the Parliamentary, Electoral and Media Arena: Crossing Boundaries (Routledge Studies on Political Parties and Party Systems) [1 ed.] 0367462737, 9780367462734

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POLITICAL INCIVILITY IN THE PARLIAMENTARY, ELECTORAL AND MEDIA ARENA

Edited by Annemarie S. Walter

Routledge Studies on Political Parties and Party Systems

POLITICAL INCIVILITY IN THE PARLIAMENTARY, ELECTORAL AND MEDIA ARENA CROSSING BOUNDARIES Edited by Annemarie S. Walter

ISBN 978-0-367-46273-4

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Political Incivility in the Parliamentary, Electoral and Media Arena

This edited volume affords conceptual and analytical convergence in the study of political incivility by bringing together theoretical and empirical work of scholars from various (sub)disciplines studying political incivility within European countries and the USA. It addresses the needs and challenges of comparative research, adding to a more generic theory on political incivility. Recent years have witnessed growing attention to issues of political incivility in the parliamentary, electoral and media arenas, with rudeness, hostility and vulgarity being highly prevalent in interactions between politicians, journalists and citizens. This book analyses what constitutes this political incivility, its occurrence, causes and effects in these various arenas, using several country-specific contexts, and presenting a cohesive edifice of knowledge on political incivility. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of parliamentary studies, political behaviour, political communication and political psychology, as well as more broadly to political science, communication science, media studies, psychology, sociology and to (non-) governmental institutions and those that are concerned about the quality of democracy or public debate. Annemarie S. Walter is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, UK.

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Routledge Studies on Political Parties and Party Systems Series Editors: Ingrid van Biezen Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Fernando Casal Bértoa, University of Nottingham, UK

This new series focuses on major issues affecting political parties in a broad sense. It welcomes a wide-range of theoretical and methodological approaches on political parties and party systems in Europe and beyond, including comparative works examining regions outside of Europe. In particular, it aims to improve our present understanding of these topics through the examination of the crisis of political parties and challenges party organizations face in the contemporary world, the increasing internal complexity of party organizations in terms of regulation, funding, membership, the more frequent presence of party system change, and the development of political parties and party systems in under-researched countries. Leaders, Factions and the Game of Intra-Party Politics Andrea Ceron Informal Politics in Post-Communist Europe Political Parties, Clientelism and State Capture Michal Klíma Political Candidate Selection Who Wins, Who Loses, and Under-Representation in the UK Jeanette Ashe Political Parties Abroad A New Arena for Party Politics Edited by Tudi Kernalegenn and Émilie van Haute Political Incivility in the Parliamentary, Electoral and Media Arena Crossing Boundaries Edited by Annemarie S. Walter

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Political Incivility in the Parliamentary, Electoral and Media Arena Crossing Boundaries

Edited by Annemarie S. Walter

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First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Annemarie S. Walter; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Annemarie S. Walter to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-46273-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02920-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times NR MT Pro by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

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In remembrance of my mother

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Contents

List of figuresix List of tablesx List of contributorsxii

Introduction: The study of political incivility and its challenges

1

ANNEMARIE S. WALTER

PART 1

Political incivility: concept and measurement

17

1

19

Civility through the comparative lens: challenges and achievements MADISON FLORES, MEGAN NAIR, MEREDITH RASMUSSEN, AND EMILY SYDNOR

2

Words that hurt democracy: the sticks and stones of anti-democratic discourse in Hungary and Germany

35

NICOLE LUGOSI-SCHIMPF AND LORI THORLAKSON

3

Measuring incivility in parliamentary debates: validating a sentiment analysis procedure with calls to order in the Austrian Parliament

56

MARCELO JENNY, MARTIN HASELMAYER AND DANIEL KAPLA

PART 2

Political incivility in the parliamentary arena

67

4

69

Legislative conflict: are ideologues more uncivil? SCOT SCHRAUFNAGEL, NICHOLAS CASAS, THOMAS BACHARZ, NATHAN HOLM AND CLAIRE MILLER

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viii  Contents 5

Contested democracy and the rise of archaic derogatory language in the Polish Parliament

87

AGNIESZKA KWIATKOWSKA

PART 3

Political incivility in the electoral arena 6

How the emotion of contempt can help explain political effects of incivility

105 107

IRA J. ROSEMAN, KYLE MATTES AND DAVID P. REDLAWSK

7

Voters’ emotional response to negative campaign messages

124

ANNEMARIE S. WALTER AND TRAVIS RIDOUT

8

A whole new ball game or not? A comparative analysis on the content of the print media news and tweets circling the November 2015 Turkish Election

143

SEÇIL TOROS AND EMRE TOROS

9

The 2016 EU referendum campaign on social media: uncivil MPs and campaign groups?

161

ESMERALDA V. BON AND ANNEMARIE S. WALTER

PART 4

Political incivility in the media arena

181

10 Interactional forms of political negativism in the broadcast political interviews of the campaign for the Italian political election of 2013

183

AUGUSTO GNISCI, FRANCESCA TANGANELLI, RITA BIANCO AND FULVIA CECERE

11 Will fouls in politics be punished? An experiment on the effect of incivility on the support for the sender and for the political system

200

JÜRGEN MAIER

12 Rude by nature? Political cartoons and political incivility

219

JOOP VAN HOLSTEYN



Conclusion: The study of political incivility and how to move forward

236

ANNEMARIE S. WALTER

Index

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List of figures

4.1 An approximated display of the ideological distance between implicated individuals and their matched pair 4.2 An approximated display of the ideological distance between implicated individuals and their matched pair 5.1 Use of archaic derogatory vocabulary in parliamentary speeches in the years 1991–2019 5.2 Usage of archaic derogatory vocabulary in parliamentary speeches in the years 1991–2019 by parliamentary parties 5.3 Usage of archaic derogatory vocabulary in parliamentary speeches by government and opposition MPs in the years 1991–2019 divided into statutory speeches (a) and interruptions (b) 7.1 Effects of different attacks on voters’ emotions (anger, anxiety, contempt, pride and hope) 8.1 The Twitter database 8.2 The newspaper database 8.3 Using the uncivil content on Twitter: Party comparisons 10.1 Effects on the answer (A3) of preceding question (Q2) and still preceding answer (A1) 10.2 Effects on the question (Q3) of preceding answer (A2) and still preceding question (Q1) 11.1 Path model for the impact of a politician’s uncivil behavior on attitudes towards him/her and towards politicians as a group 11.2 Overview of the experiment (all conditions) 11.3 Path model for the impact of Sigmar Gabriel’s uncivil behavior on attitudes towards him and towards politicians as a group (uncivil condition vs. control group) 11.4 Path model for the impact of Sigmar Gabriel’s uncivil behavior on attitudes towards him and towards politicians as a group (uncivil vs. civil condition) 12.1 Visual stimuli in questionnaire 12.2 Overview of groups in survey experiment

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77 78 94 96

97 135 152 153 155 193 194 204 207 212 213 224 225

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List of tables

3.1 Calls to Order in the National Council (lower house) 3.2 Debate speeches and Calls to Order in the National Council 3.3 Confusion matrix of logistic regression model of Calls to Order on statement negativity 4.1 Chamber and partisan tags 1877–2014: individuals implicated in norm breaking incivilities 4.2 Bivariate correlations: average ideological distance of individuals implicated in norm breaking incivilities versus their matched pair, using the Chamber median DW-NOMINATE score as the baseline 4.3 Bivariate correlations: average ideological distance of individuals implicated in norm breaking incivilities versus their matched pair, using the party median DW-NOMINATE score as the baseline 4.4 Testing for an association between norm breaking incivilities and ideological extremism: a consideration of the Chamber median 4.5 Testing for an association between norm breaking incivilities and ideological extremism: a consideration of the party median 5.1 Determinants of use of archaic derogatory language 5.2 Occurrences of keywords in parliamentary debates 1991–2019 6.1 Correlations among self-reported two-party vote choice, feeling thermometer ratings, and felt emotions re Clinton and Trump 6.2 Emotions predicting vote choice (Cooperative Congressional Election Study) 7.1 Two vignettes examples 7.2 Overview of the experimental design (all conditions) 7.3 Sample demographics 7.4 Manipulation check 7.5 Correlations among emotions

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58 58 61 74

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List of tables xi 7.6 Effect of treatments and demographics on experience of emotions 8.1a The newspaper database 8.1b The Twitter database 8.2a Logistic regression results, Tweets, dependent variable incivility 8.2b Logistic regression results, Tweets, dependent variable incivility 9.1 Overview included campaign groups 9.2 The distribution of MPs and their posts in the data set 9.3 The distribution of campaign groups and their post in the data set 9.4 Example postings which high incivility, politeness and negative emotions 9.5 Use of incivility, lack of politeness and negative emotions 9.6 Month by month comparison of the number of posts featuring incivility, lack of politeness and the average percentage of negative emotions in the posts 9.7 Explaining MPs’ use of incivility, lack of politeness and negative emotions 9.8 Explaining campaign groups’ use of incivility, lack of politeness and negative emotions 10.1 Significance of the adjusted residuals and Yule’s Q for face-threatening questions posed to different coalitions in different channels 10.2 Significance of the adjusted residuals and Yule’s Q for face-threatening questions for the three broadcasts of Rai3 10.3 Significance of the adjusted residuals and Yule’s Q for face-threatening questions for three La7’s broadcasts and one of Sky 11.1 Pre- and posttest attributes ascribed to Sigmar Gabriel by group (means) 11.2 Perception of (specific) emotions for Sigmar Gabriel by experimental group (percentages) 12.1a Evaluation of personality traits and overall affect score Rutte, Wilders and Samsom 12.1b Evaluation of ABI-model for Rutte, Wilders and Samsom 12.2a The impact of visual information of trait evaluations for Rutte, Wilders and Samsom 12.2b Evaluation of ABI-model for Rutte, Wilders and Samsom

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137 150 151 154 154 166 166 167 168 169 171 172 174 191 192 192 208 209 226 227 228 228

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List of contributors

Thomas Bacharz , graduate student, Department of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, United States. Rita Bianco, graduate student, Department of Psychology, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy. Esmeralda Bon , graduate student, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Nicholas Casas, graduate student, Department of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, United States. Fulvia Cecere, graduate student Department of Psychology, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy. Madison Flores , undergraduate student Political Science, Southwestern University, United States. Augusto Gnisci , Full Professor, Department of Psychology, Second University of Naples, Italy. Martin Haselmayer, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Austria. Nathan Holm, graduate student, Northern Illinois University, United States. Marcelo Jenny, Full Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria. Daniel Kapla , Pre-doc project research assistant, Institute of Statistics and Mathematical Methods in Economics, Vienna University of Technology, Austria. Agnieszka Kwiatkowska , Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Social Science and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. Kyle Mattes, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Florida International University, United States.

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List of contributors xiii Claire Miller , undergraduate student, Department of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, United States. Megan Nair , undergraduate student, Department of Political Science, Southwestern University, United States. Nicole Lugosi-Schimpf, PhD candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, Canada. Jürgen Maier, Full Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. , undergraduate student, Department of Political Meredith Rasmussen Science, Southwestern University, United States. David P. Redlawsk, Full Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware, United States. Travis Ridout, Full Professor, Washington State University, United States. Ira J. Roseman, Full Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University, United States. Scott Schraufnagel, Full Professor, Northern Illinois University, United States , Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Emily Sydnor Southwestern University, United States. Francesca Tanganelli, graduate student, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy. , Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Lori Thorlakson University of Alberta, United States. Emre Toros, Associate Professor, Political Science and Public Administration, Atilim University, Turkey. , Assistant Professor, Industrial Product Design, Atilim Seçil Toros University, Turkey. , Full Professor, Department of Political Science, Joop van Holsteyn University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Annemarie S. Walter, Assistant Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.

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Introduction The study of political incivility and its challenges Annemarie S. Walter

In this introduction we set out the academic and societal concerns about ‘political incivility’, the state and challenges of the relatively young field ‘political incivility’, conceptualize ‘political incivility’ and provide an overview of what is to come in this edited volume. This volume addresses some of the challenges that this young field faces, in particular the dominance of studies conducted in the U.S. and of U.S theoretical perspectives. The chapters of this edited volume are the result of the workshop ‘Political Incivility in Parliament, Party Competition and Political Communication’ held at the 2017 European Consortium Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions in Nottingham. This workshop brought together a group of European and American scholars working on political incivility. Hereby we thank the ECPR for supporting this workshop, the other participants of the workshop for their participation and comments and the editor’s Nottingham Research Fellowship of the University of Nottingham for financially supporting the participation of some of the workshop participants. These selected contributions aim to provide further insights on what constitutes political incivility, its occurrence, causes and effects in various arenas, i.e. parliament, media, electoral competition and in various country-specific contexts, i.e. Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States. This volume can be regarded a first step towards a cohesive edifice of knowledge on political incivility bringing together this variety of work with the purpose of showing the various similarities and dissimilarities across these contexts. We hereby hope to stimulate the comparative study of political incivility.

Current concerns about political incivility Recent years witnessed a growing concern about uncivil politics in the parliamentary, electoral and media arenas (Carter, 1997; Shea and Sproveri, 2012). Ad hominem argumentation, rudeness, hostility and emotionality seem to characterize many verbal and non-verbal interactions among politicians and exchanges between politicians, journalists and citizens. Current communication technologies make incivility immediately visible to larger

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2  Annemarie S. Walter parts of society (Mutz, 2015), not only witnessed by its partakers, but by the larger public, particularly because media broadcasts political incivility enthusiastically, sometimes even inciting it (Mutz, 2015; Sobieraj and Berry, 2011). In addition, features of social media, such as its experience of anonymity (even when false), its impersonality and ideological homophily, the tendency to associate with others similar to oneself in political ideology, are argued to stimulate uncivil behaviour of elites and citizens online (Suler, 2004; Kiesler et al., 1984). Currently political incivility seems to have more negative than positive consequences for both representative and deliberative democracy. Most citizens strongly dislike uncivil politics (Shea and Fiorina, 2012; Mattes and Redlawsk, 2014) and (continuous) exposure to it has been demonstrated to lead to increased political cynicism and to a decrease in political participation (Mutz and Reeves, 2005; Fridkin and Kenney 2008; 2011; Mutz, 2015). In addition, it tends to delegitimize politicians and the political process in the eyes of many citizens and to weaken their willingness to accept policies that they do not support (Mutz, 2015). Exposure to political incivility not only impacts citizens’ attitudes, but also their behaviour. Mass discourse tends to mirror elite discourse. Citizens tend to mimic the behaviour of their political leaders, including engaging in political uncivil discourse (Gervais, 2014; Coffey et al., 2015). However, political incivility is not by all perceived as solely a negative phenomenon (e.g. Mutz, 2015; Chen, 2017). Political incivility is said to enlarge the audiences reached by politicians, to strengthen the public’s interest in politics and to stimulate recall of political information (Mutz, 2015). Political incivility does not only affect the attitudes and behaviour of citizens, but also of the (political) elite. At the elite level, political incivility by politicians is argued to lead to increased party polarization and less effective government (Wolf, Strachan and Shea, 2012; Jamieson, 2001; Maisel, 2012). Political incivility by citizens can hamper politicians in their work and negatively affect their well-being (Gorrell et al., 2018). The practice of incivility is particularly regarded as worrisome by those who consider civil debate a requirement for a well-functioning deliberative democracy (Maisel, 2012). The idea that people who speak in public forums should engage in civil discourse is a prominent normative perspective in society (Mendelberg, 2009). However, limited empirical research exists on the effects of uncivil discourse on deliberative processes and therefore it is uncertain to what extent discourse must be civil for it to have beneficial results (Gervais, 2013). U.S. president Donald Trump is currently seen by many as the personification of political incivility. Trump’s rhetoric challenges previously existing political and discursive norms and diverges strongly from the communicative style of his predecessors (Jamieson and Tausig, 2017; Coe and Park-Ozee, 2019). Trump frequently engages in uncivil discourse, such as personal attacks on his opponents’ appearance (Jamieson and Tausig 2017). He remarked about Republican candidate Carly Fiorina during the 2016

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Introduction 3 primary race: “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”1 He said about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton “I just don’t think she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look.”2 Members of the media are also frequently targeted. He has described journalists with terms as “scum,” “slime,” “disgusting,” and “enem[ies] of the people.”3 Quinnipiac University Poll reports 3 July 2018 that 91 per cent of U.S. citizens consider the lack of civility in politics a serious problem and 47 per cent of U.S. citizens blames Trump for this lack of civility. Recent academic work supports the view that Trump disproportionately engages in uncivil behaviour (Jamieson and Tausig, 2017; Coe and Park-Ozee, 2019; Kenski et al., 2018). Kenski et al. (2018) examining one type of uncivil discourse, namely accusations of lying, find that Trump made more accusations of lying than any other candidate during the 2018 primary elections. Following the logic that citizens mimic their political leaders, we can expect Trump’s uncivil discourse to inspire U.S. citizens. Southern Poverty Law Centre (2016) reports on the basis of a survey of approximately 2000 K-12 teachers that children in U.S. classrooms felt emboldened by the uncivil campaign rhetoric in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign and teachers have noted a decreased ability to engage in civil discourse in general and an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail. Nithyanand et al. (2017) find a strong correlation between Trump’s rise in popularity and the increasing incivility observed in Republican forums on Reddit. Although Trump features prominent in the public and academic debate on political incivility, by no means is the concern about the lack of civility in public discourse restricted to the United States. In the United Kingdom similar concerns exist about the retreat of civility in public discourse. The rhetoric used in the 2016 EU referendum campaign and its aftermath was divisive and uncivil (Martin, 2016; Ramswell, 2017).4 The murder of Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox during the campaign made politicians and journalists question the tone of political debate in the UK and led to a short period of reflection.5 Even in The Netherlands we find recurrent concerns about the tone of public debate, in spite of traditionally important conventions that govern the interactions between political elites (Walter, 2010). These unwritten rules include the civil requirements of depoliticisation, the agreement to disagree and business-like politics which have long been regarded as necessary to avoid political conflict to become unmanageable (cf. Lijphart, 1999; Lijphart, 1982).6 An opinion poll of IPSOS in 2017 reports that half of the Dutch think that debate in the Dutch Second Chamber (Dutch Lower House,) has become more uncivil. This perception is shared by many MPs. In 2007 the majority of members of the Dutch Second Chamber sent to the chair a letter with the plea for a ‘moral code’ to guarantee civil language.7 The topic of political incivility is thus itself

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4  Annemarie S. Walter frequently part of public debate within and outside of the U.S. context, and has increasingly captured scholarly attention (Shea and Sproveri, 2011).

Challenges to the study of political incivility Many phenomena presented in this introductory chapter as manifestations of incivility have been studied before, but mainly when the focus was on something else than incivility, such as parliamentary behaviour (e.g. Bates et al., 2014; Ilie, 2004; Murphey, 2014; Uslaner, 1996), dominant norms of the journalistic community (e.g. Bull and Mayer, 1993; Clayman et al., 2006; Clayman and Heritage, 2002; Gnisci and Bonaiuto, 2003), norms of interpersonal communication (Tracey, 2011; Harris, 2001; Nau and Stewart, 2013) and state repression of individual and organized (political) dissent (e.g. Boykoff, 2006, 2007; Pearce, 2015; Saka, 2018). The study of political incivility as a phenomenon in its own right is relatively new (Shea and Sproveri, 2012) and like any other field in its infancy, it faces challenges. The first challenge is that the various studies on forms of (in)civility in politics remain fragmented in conceptualization and operationalization. Conceptual issues about the nature of political (in)civility are frequently addressed (yet not yet systematised). Many scholars see political incivility as a rudeness or impoliteness that violates social norms (Maisel, 2012; Mutz, 2015). However, Papacharissi (2004) emphasizes that impoliteness and incivility should not be equated. In her view, incivility is discourse that “threaten[ed] democracy, den[ied] people their personal freedoms” or “stereotyp[ed] social groups (2004; 267).” Muddiman (2017) argues that there are two types of incivility, namely incivility as violations of interpersonal politeness norms (personal-level incivility) and violations of norms governing the political process and political deliberation (public-level incivility). Not only do we find a large variety of definitions of political incivility in the scholarly literature, but also a large range of terms that are used as synonyms such as non-cooperation, impoliteness, lack of comity, disrespect, demonization, hate speech and negativity. Recent work even adds new terms; Berry and Sobieraj (2014) introduce the term ‘outrage’ and Mutz (2015) presents ‘In-your-face-politics’. This heterogeneous terminology for political incivility only adds to conceptual confusion. Most scholarly work that addresses incivility takes an analyst-driven approach. However, a few exceptions take a citizen-driven approach (see Muddiman, 2017; Stryker et al., 2016; Kenski et al., 2017). In these latter instances scholars have turned to citizens to see whether they can help answer the question what political incivility entails. To my knowledge no studies exist that use a similar approach but then based upon the understanding of the term by political elites. Stryker et al. (2016) argue that among U.S. students there is a great deal of consensus of what constitutes incivility. They find that students perceive political incivility as having three latent dimensions, namely discursive incivility, utterance incivility and deception.

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Introduction 5 Discursive incivility includes speech and behaviours related to personal attacks, insulting language, and slurs, such as name-calling, vulgarity, reputation attacks and demonization. Utterance incivility includes behaviour that prevents a respectful and inclusive discussion, such as interrupting, violating space, rolling eyes and refusing to listen. Deception includes exaggeration, misleading and failing to provide evidence. Muddiman (2017) finds that U.S. citizens tend to consider interpersonal impoliteness less uncivil than violations of the political process and deliberation. Interpersonal impoliteness was operationalized as insulting language/name-calling, obscene language, or emotional language/displays, such as extreme anger. Violations of political process and deliberation were operationalized as lack of compromise, misinformation, ideological extremity and lack of comity and non-public acts, such as taking secret foreign donations. Kenski et al. (2017) examines citizens’ perceptions of incivility in public discourse unlike the previous two studies that looked at elite discourse. They found that the public perceives name-calling (i.e. ad hominem attacks), vulgarity (i.e. curse words), accusations of lying (i.e. charges that the other person is dishonest), pejorative for speech (i.e. mocking the way someone expresses him or herself) and aspersions (i.e. disrespectful attacks on an idea) as uncivil. Name-calling and vulgarity were considered by citizens to be more uncivil than the other speech acts. The second challenge is that work on political incivility is scattered across various (sub)disciplines such as parliamentary studies (see Ahuja, 2008; Jamieson, 2001, Bates et al., 2014; Dodd and Schraufnagel, 2012), (political) communication (see Brooks and Geer, 2007; Fridkin and Kenney, 2011; Sobieraj and Berry, 2011), (political) psychology (see Alon and Omer, 2008; Mölders et al., 2015; Nau and Stewart, 2013), (political) discourse analysis (see Bull and Wells, 2011; Harris, 2001; Murphey, 2014, Ilie 2004), (political) sociology (Boykoff, 2007; Earl, 2011) and political theory (see Sinopoli, 1995; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996; Macedo, 1999). As a consequence, scholars are largely unaware of work across these (sub)disciplinary boundaries. This fragmentation limits the development of a cohesive edifice of knowledge, thereby restricting the progress of political incivility as a field. The third challenge is that the majority of work examining political (in) civility is conducted in the United States which challenges the generalizability of theory and results to other political systems. In addition, it leaves one to wonder to what extent this call for more civil debate is particular to the United States. The limited number of studies conducted in other contexts, such as Germany (Hoppmann et al., 2018; Kalch and Naab, 2017), United Kingdom (Gorell et al., 2018; Bull and Wells, 2011; Murphey, 2014; Harris, 2004), Italy (Gnisci and Bonaiuto, 2003), Sweden (Ilie, 2004), Indonesia (Molaei, 2014) indicate that concerns about incivility are not limited to the US context. Studies examining political incivility in more than one country still seem to be lacking (notable exceptions are Marien et al., 2020; Otto, 2020). A potential challenge to comparative work is the need for a definition and

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6  Annemarie S. Walter operationalization of political incivility that can travel beyond the country specific context. The fourth challenge is the dominance of work on political incivility studying elite actors, consequently ignoring other types of political incivility. Political incivility is not limited to communicative interactions between elites, such as politicians and journalists. Political incivility can also be a property of communicative interactions between other actors. Disregarding the fact that incivility is not necessarily unilateral by nature (see next section in this chapter) at least 4 types of political incivility can be distinguished: (1) Political incivility committed by elite actors targeted at elite actors. This is the type of political incivility that receives most attention. (2) Political incivility committed by elite actors targeted at non-elite actors. For example Labour party leader Gordon Brown called a Labour supporter ‘a bigoted woman’ after a TV interview in Rochdale in the 2010 election campaign. His microphone was still on when the interview had ended and his remarks were broadcasted on air.8 Academic work studying this type of incivility seems absent. (3) Political incivility committed by non-elite actors targeted at elite actors. Scholars examining this type conduct for example research on how citizens interact in uncivil ways with authority, such as work on citizens’ verbally abusing politicians and journalists online (e.g. Gorrell et al., 2018; Löfgren Nilsson and Örnebring, 2016). A more distant discipline that takes interest in incivility by citizens targeting elite is mental health studies. Due to the nature of their work politicians are at greater risk of (cyber) stalking, (online) harassment, attacks and assassination than the general population (James et al., 2016; Narud and Dahl, 2015; Adams et al., 2009). (4) Political incivility committed by non-elite actors targeted at non-elite actors. Most research studying this type of political incivility examines the interactions of citizens online and its effects (e.g. Gervais, 2015; Rösner et al., 2016; Borah, 2014). All types need to be studied for a better understanding of political incivility.

What is political incivility? Previously we illustrated the various definitions and the large number of terms scholars use for political incivility and related phenomena. This section attempts to contribute to more conceptual clarity, in order to avoid that the concept becomes so wide and multifaceted that it loses its analytical usefulness. Conceptualisation requires the specification of three different elements. First, we need to establish what kind of phenomena are to be characterised in terms of incivility. Secondly, we need to specify what distinguishes civil from uncivil (or different degrees of incivility). Thirdly, we have to clarify the distinction between incivility in general and political incivility. Some usages of the term suggest that incivility would be a property of people, as implied when, e.g., qualifying Trump as its personification. We do

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Introduction 7 not consider this useful, because it fails to distinguish between how a person behaves, acts and expresses him/herself at different moments and in different contexts. It is unlikely that any person will behave ‘incivil’ invariably and to a uniform degree in all circumstances. Sometimes incivility is seen as characterising verbal and nonverbal expressions and behaviours, such as when someone exclaims that someone else is ‘a lying bastard’. The problem here is that this is too little specific as it disregards context: the character (and incivility) of such exclamations is very different when they occur in a conversation with a trusted friend, than when they are made in the face of the person labelled as a ‘bastard’. This reasoning does not only apply to the manifest or latent content of verbal and nonverbal expressions, but also for the tone, forcefulness or emotionality with which they are delivered. These considerations lead to conceptualising incivility as a property of communicative interactions between actors. A communicative interaction requires at least two actors to be involved, and they may comprise verbal as well as of non-verbal communicative behaviours. Conceptualising incivility as a property of communicative interactions (rather than a property of actors, or of behaviours) has a number of advantages and implications, some of these we will discuss. First of all, the interaction perspective implies the existence of behaviours that can be explicit or implicit, intended or unintended (i.e., presence or absence of the intention to be uncivil), verbal or nonverbal. It is the character of these behaviours that determines whether the interaction has to be classed as civil or uncivil. The interaction perspectives do require that these behaviours are observed by actors involved in the relationship. Without communicative behaviour being observed there is no interaction; thus what someone does in private (e.g., when writing a diary) is not to be classed as uncivil. The behaviour does not necessarily have to be observed by all actors immediately. Which actors are involved in the relationship can only be determined afterwards. Second, the behaviours in the interaction have to contain a communicative aspect. This implies that the behaviour of an actor must have a target, i.e., it must be directed to someone else. This raises the question whether this implies that a) behaviour in question is intentionally targeted to communicate something to someone else, or b) whether it has to be interpreted by that other person as being directed to him or her, or c) whether both conditions have to be fulfilled. The answer is largely conditional on whether incivility is the dependent or independent variable in the research question, i.e. for explaining uncivil communicative interactions intentionality is generally assumed and for explaining the effects of uncivil communicative interactions recipients must interpret them as being directed at them. The communicative behaviours can be uncivil to a particular person to particular people, while not being so to others, to whom the behaviour is not directed (or for whom the behaviour has a different explicit or implied communicative content). In any case, a communicative interaction is a dyadic relationship. In addition to the relationship with an immediate target, others may be

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8  Annemarie S. Walter drawn into dyadic interaction because they witness the interaction directed to the immediate target. Therefore, many political communicative interactions generate multiple simultaneous dyadic relationships; this may seem complex, but it has the unmistakable advantage that it becomes possible to differentiate between all these simultaneous interactions in terms of their incivility (something that would not be possible if we were to focus only on the behaviour of the single actor who initiates communicative behaviour). Third, as a further elaboration of point two, communicative interactions may be direct i.e., originating actor and the person(s) to who it is directed may be in direct contact (face to face, audio- or videolink, etc.), but this is not necessary. The interaction may be indirect, however, as when a politician communicates to others via an interview, in the full knowledge or expectation that these others will be exposed to it. The interaction may also be ‘collateral’, when behaviours are directed to a specific target, but directly or indirectly witnessed by others (who are therefore drawn into interactions). Fourth, communicative interactions can be unidirectional –when only one actor in a dyad engages in behaviours that make the interaction uncivil, or it may be reciprocal, where the actor targeted by someone’s behaviours responds (not necessarily in the same way, thus, the interaction may be reciprocal without any incivility necessarily being reciprocal). Fifth, the behaviour of an actor can be communicated to multiple others, which implies the existence of multiple, simultaneous communicative interactions. If that behaviour is uncivil to one of those who are involved in these interactions, it is not necessarily also uncivil towards others. As an example: in a group of people, when actor A acts uncivil towards actor B; it may also be uncivil towards actor C and actor D, but this is not necessarily so. To illustrate, when a political leader mocks her opponent in parliament for his appearance, this is uncivil towards her opponent, and to others from her opponent’s party who witness this exchange and therefore also get drawn into interactions. At the same time, it is likely not uncivil towards her colleagues from her own party who witness it (and are therefore also drawn into interactions), except when they themselves feel embarrassed by the behaviour of their own party leader. Sixth, this conceptualization is not only interesting at the micro level, as communicative interactions between individuals, but also relevant for considering entire political systems. At the level of the political system Not all actors in all these dyadic relationships are equivalent. Interactions between politicians will be witnessed by millions of ‘spectators’ who themselves are not directly involved in the political arena. As we will see, the relevance of incivility relates to its capacity to hinder or obstruct the participation of others in common deliberation or decision making. The spectators are, when seen from that perspective, not necessarily very important. They may become important, however, in terms of public evaluations of political actors, and the repercussions of these aspects of public opinion for yet other interactions (e.g., in electoral choices, or for donating money, etc.).

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Introduction 9 Finally, this conceptualisation of incivility as an element of the behaviours that constitute communicative interactions implies that graph analysis is in principle an ideal approach for empirical analysis Taken all together, the perspective of communicative interactions considers any incivility as a characteristic of interacting dyads, in which the interactive element consists of both actors in the dyad being cognisant of the communicative behaviours (which may be directed towards one of the actors in the dyad, or to others, but witnessed by the other actor in the dyad). The notion of political incivility is sometimes used to refer to discourse at an aggregate level, such as parliamentary debate or even general public discourse directed to mass publics. In these instances the communicative interactions are of the kind that each speaker communicates to each of the others (multiple simultaneous dyadic interactions), and the ensemble of these communications across participating speakers may be characterised in terms of the prevalence of incivility (frequency or relative frequency) in all these interactions. Analyzing and representing social networks is the domain of graph theory (See for instance West, 2020). However, such formalised analytical approaches are not necessarily required to use the conceptualisation that is proposed here. The second element of conceptualising political incivility is to specify what it is that renders a communicative interaction uncivil. Everyday understanding of the term uncivil revolves around being without good manners, rude, impolite or discourteous. The problem is, of course, that what good manners are is itself not necessarily agreed upon, and that they vary across time, across cultures, and thus also across subcultures in a political system. Thus, what would be considered by some to be uncivil, would not necessarily be considered as such by others. One could thus consider incivility as entirely being in the eye of the beholder, which would make the concept difficult to use in empirical research because it is often not possible to establish every individual’s idiosyncratic interpretation. It is therefore relevant that, even when notions of (in)civility are often contested, there exists nevertheless a dominant interpretation of these terms in a (sub)culture or a (segment of a) society, which also define (dominant) norms for ‘proper’ behavior in specific contexts. When seen from this perspective, it is obvious that communicative interactions are uncivil when they violate these (dominant) social norms and civil when they do not. It is theoretically possible to distinguish degrees of incivility on the basis of the number of norms or how strongly these norms are violated in uncivil communicative interactions, however, it is not possible to distinguish degrees of civility as there are logically no degrees of ‘absence’. The particular norms that are involved in classifying communicative interactions as uncivil relate to the ideal of political equality that underlies liberal democracies. This ideal implies the existence of a level playing field for contributing to public discourse, to deliberation, and collective decision making. Incivility undermines this ideal of political equality by increasing the (psychological) costs of taking part in public discourse, deliberation and

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10  Annemarie S. Walter collective decision making. Thus, incivility benefits the strong, the powerful, and the well-educated etc., at the expense of the weak, the powerless and the less-educated, who are less able to bear these costs. The ideal of political equality is supported by laws (that prohibit, e.g., violent behaviour and violent threats to representatives) and norms (Galston, 2013). Norms are guidelines or expectations of acceptable standards of behaviour that can, but do not have to be written down in law. Political incivility does not pertain to communicative interactions that are illegal also legal communicative interactions can be labelled uncivil. The third, and final aspect of conceptualising political incivility involves the specification of the ‘political’. Politically relevant interactions are not limited to interactions between politicians, but can involve other elite actors, such as the media or non-elite actors, such as citizens. Elite actors differ from non-elite actors in their goals (pursuing ideas and power) and amount of resources to do so (Van der Eijk, 2018). Politically relevant are communicative interactions between actors that partake in political processes. This includes politicians debating policy proposals in parliament, but also their campaigning in the form of canvassing, debating with their opponents, and communicating via advertisements, posters and billboards. The relevance of all these communicative interactions depends on the specific research questions one wants to address. When focussing, for example, on the effects of uncivil behaviour of one of the politicians in a campaign debate on the performance of other participants, it is irrelevant how journalists or the wider group of spectators evaluate that behaviour. But when the question is how citizens’ electoral choices are affected by incivility between politicians, then the perceptions of these spectators are of utmost relevance To summarize, we regard incivility as a property of communicative interactions. Communicative interactions are uncivil when they violate dominant social norms regarding the ideal of political equality, i.e. behaviours that make it more costly for actors to partake in public discourse, deliberation and collective decision making. Political incivility refers to all uncivil communicative interactions that are politically relevant, i.e. interactions between actors that partake in political processes. Although this chapter sets out a definition of political incivility, by no means this implies that all contributors share this definition of political incivility. This volume reflects the current conceptual and operational diversity in the field.

Outline book The structure of this edited volume is as follows: The first three chapters address questions of conceptualization and measurement. In chapter 1 Madison Flores, Megan Nair, Meredith Rasmussen, and Emily Sydnor present a systematic review of research in comparative context, discuss the conceptualization and measurement of political incivility cross nationally

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Introduction 11 pointing out hurdles that we need to overcome. Nicole Lugosi-Schimpf and Lori Thorlakson set out in chapter 2 the concept of anti-democratic discourse, i.e. a particular form of uncivil discourse that attacks and undermines values of liberal democracy, which they assess in Germany and Hungary. Marcelo Jenny, Martin Haselmayer and Daniel Kapla describe and test in chapter 3 a sentiment analysis procedure for a graded measure of incivility using Austrian parliamentary speeches. Chapter 4 and 5 of this volume focus on political incivility in the context of parliament. Chapter 4 by Scott Schraufnagel, Nicholas Casas, Thomas Bacharz, Nathan Holm and Claire Miller studies the varying levels of civility in U.S. Congress since 1877 and argues that there is limited evidence that the members who are most disagreeable on policy are the members that engage the most in uncivil discourse with their colleagues. In chapter 5 Agnieszka Kwiatkowska examines the substantial increase in archaic derogatory language in Polish Parliament in the last quarter century. Chapter 6 through 9 present work on political incivility in the electoral arena. In chapter 6 Ira Roseman, Kyle Mattes and David Redlawsk argue that incivility often conveys the emotion contempt towards its targets and show the importance of feelings of contempt for the rivalling party for voters’ vote choice in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Annemarie Walter and Travis Ridout show in chapter 7 that both negative and uncivil messages generate negative emotions among voters, but that the strength of voters’ emotional response varies depending on the type of attack, with uncivil attacks having the greatest impact. In chapter 8 Seçil Toros and Emre Toros examines when candidates are most likely to be uncivil and whether the use of incivility differs across campaign mediums in the context of the 2015 Turkish elections. Esmeralda Bon and Annemarie S. Walter examine in chapter 9 the use of political incivility in the 2016 EU referendum campaign online by studying MPs and campaign groups Facebook posts. The three last chapters take a closer look at political incivility in the media arena. Chapter 10 by Augusto Gnisci, Francesca Tanganelli, Rita Bianco and Fulvia Cecere discusses how the (in)civility of the questions journalists ask affect the (in)civility of the answers given by politicians in Italian political interviews. In chapter 11 Jürgen Maier examines the effects of televised uncivil verbal and non-verbal behaviour of politicians on voters’ evaluations of the politician and party in Germany. Joop van Holsteyn examines in chapter 12 the impact of uncivil political cartoons on Dutch politicians’ evaluations. The edited volume concludes with a conclusion summarizing the main findings in the book and setting out a research agenda for the study of political incivility in comparative perspective in the future.

Notes 1. Paul Solotaroff, Trump Seriously: On the Trail with the GOP’s Tough Guy, Rolling Stone, 9 September 2015 2. Interview ABC News, broadcasted 6 September 2016

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12  Annemarie S. Walter 3. Tashman, B. (2017, October 13). Donald Trump Thinks the Freedom of the Press Is “Disgusting.” 4. Rupert Meyers, Respect and civility in public discourse have evaporated with Brexit, the Guardian, 27 June 2016 5. Lucia Graves, Hate killings won’t end until toxic political discourse does, the Guardian, 18 June 2016; Noah Daponte Smith, Have we lost all hope of maintaining political incivility?, National Review, 20 June 2016 6. Paulus Houthuijs, ‘Verruwing in de politiek komt steeds een stapje hoger te liggen’, NOS online, 19 March 2018; Naaijer, Janita, Bij debatteren hoort ook luisteren, de Volkskrant, 8 June 2016 7. Celstraf voor doodsbedreiging Pechtold, Nu.nl, 20 December 2016 8. Polly Curtis, Gordon Brown calls Labour supporter a ‘bigoted woman, the Guardian, 28 April 2010

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14  Annemarie S. Walter Jamieson, K.H. and Tausig, D. (2017). Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. Trump. Political Science Quarterly, 132(4), 619–648. Jamieson, K.H. (2001). Civility in the House of Representatives: The 106th Congress, Report Series. The Annenberg Public Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Kalch, A. and Naab, T.K. (2017). Replying, disliking, flagging: How users engage with uncivil and impolite comments on news websites. Studies in Communication and Media, 6(4), 397–419. Kenski, K., File, C.R. and Conway-Silva, B.A. (2018). Lying, Liars and Lies: Incivility in 2016 Presidential Candidate and Campaign Tweets During the Invisible Primary. American Behavioral Scientist, 62(3), 286–299. Kenski, K., Coe, K. and Rains, S.A. (2017). Perceptions of Uncivil Discourse Online: An Examination of Types and Predictors. Communication Research, 1–20. Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., McGuire, T.W. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication. American Psychologist, 39(10), 1123–1134. Lijphart, A. (1982). Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek. Amsterdam: J. H. De Bussy. Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Löfgren Nilsson, M. and Örnebring, H. (2016). Journalism Under Threat. Journalism Practice, 10(7), 880–890. Macedo, S. (ed.) (1999). Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement. New York: Oxford University Press Maisel, L.S. (2012). The Negative Consequences of Uncivil Political Discourse, PS: Political Science & Politics. 45(3), 405–411. Marien, S., Goovaerts, I. and Elstub, S. (2020). Deliberative qualities in televised election debates: the influence of the electoral system and populism. West European Politics, 43(6), 1262–1284. Martin, J. (2016). The rhetoric of excess, p. 21. In Jackson, Daniel, Thorson, Einar and Dominic Wring (eds). EU Referendum Analysis 2016: Media Voters and the Campaign. Bournemouth University: The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community Mattes, K. and Redlawsk, D.P. (2014). The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning. Chicago: Chicago University Press Mendelberg, T. (2009). Deliberation, incivility, and race in electoral campaigns. In D. King, R. Lieberman, G. Ritter, and Whitehead, L. (Eds.), Democratization in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 157–183 Molaei, H. (2014). The prospect of civility in Indonesians’ online polarized political discussions. Asian Journal of Communication, 24(5), 490–504. Mölders, C., Van Quaquebeke, N. and Paladino, M.P. (2015). Consequences of Politicians’ Disrespectful Communication Depend on Social Judgment Dimensions and Voters’ Moral Identity, Political Psychology, DOI: 10.1111/ pops.12311 Muddiman, A. (2017). Personal and Public Levels of Political Incivility. International Journal of Communication, 3182–3202. Murphey, J. (2014). (Im)politeness during Prime Ministers Questions in the UK Parliament. Pragmatics and Society, 5(1), 76–104.

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Introduction 15 Mutz, D. and Reeves, B. (2005). The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust. American Political Science Review, 99(1): 1–15. Mutz, D.C. (2015). In-Your-Face Politics, The Consequences of Uncivil Media. Princeton: Princeton University Press Narud, K. and Dahl, A.A. (2015). Stalking experiences reported by Norwegian members of Parliament compared to a population sample. The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 26(1), 116–131 Nau, C. and Stewart, C.O. (2013). Effects of Verbal Aggression and Party Identification Bias on Perceptions of Political Speakers. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1177/0261927X13512486 Otto, L.P., Lecheler, S., and Schuck, A. (2020). Is Context the Key? The (Non-) Differential Effects of Mediated Incivility in Three European Countries. Political Communication, 37(1), 88–107. Nithyanand, R., Schaffner, B. and Gill, P. (2017). Online Political Discourse in the Trump Era, arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.05303 Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy online: civility, politeness and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. New Media & Society, 6(2), 259–283. Pearce, K.E. (2015). Democratizing kompromat: the affordances of social media for state-sponsored harassment. Information, Communication & Society, 18(10), 1158–1174, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1021705 Ramswell, P. (2017). Derision, division–decision: parallels between Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election. European Political Science, 16(2), 217–232. Rösner, L., Winter, S. and Krämer, N.C. (2016). Dangerous Minds? Effects of uncivil online comments on aggressive cognitions, emotions and behaviour. Computers in Human Behaviour, 58, 461–470. Saka, E. (2018). Social Media in Turkey as a Space for Political Battles: AKTrolls and other Politically motivated trolling. Middle East Critique, 27(2), 161-177. Shea, D.M. and Fiorina, M.P. (2012). Can We Talk? The Rise of Rude, Nasty, Stubborn Politics. New York: Pearson Shea, D.M. and Sproveri, A. (2012). The Rise and Fall of Nasty Politics in America. PS: Political Science & Politics, 45(3): 416–421. Sinopoli, R. (1995). Thick-skinned Liberalism, Redefining Civility. American Political Science Review, 89(3), 614–615. Sobieraj, S. and Berry, J.M. (2011). From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News, Political Communication, 28(1), 19–41. Stryker, R., Conway, B.A. and Danielson, J.T. (2016). What is political incivility? Communication Monographs, DOI: 10.1080/03637751.2016.1201207 Southern Poverty Law Centre (2016). The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools. Report Southern Poverty Law Centre, 13 April 2016. Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321–326. Tracey, K. (2011). “Reasonable hostility”: Its usefulness and limitation as a norm for public hearings. Informal Logic, 31(3), 171–190. Uslaner, E.M. (1996). The decline of comity in Congress. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

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16  Annemarie S. Walter Van der Eijk, C. (2018). The Essence of Politics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press Walter, A.S. (2010). Negatieve campagnevoering in de Nederlandse consensusdemocratie: de ontwikkelingen sinds Fortuyn, Res Publica, 52(3), 293–314. West, D.B. (2020). Introduction to Graph Theory. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ Wolf, M.R., Strachan, C.J. and Shea, D.M. (2012). Incivility and Standing Firm: A Second Layer of Partisan Division. PS: Political Science and Politics, 45(3), 428–434.

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Part 1

Political incivility: concept and measurement

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Civility through the comparative lens: challenges and achievements Madison Flores, Megan Nair, Meredith Rasmussen, and Emily Sydnor

Introduction In 2011, a shooting at a Tucson, Arizona strip mall killed six and wounded 13, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. In the wake of that shooting, US President Barack H. Obama called for an end to partisan vitriol and hatred, stating that “only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud” (Swaine, 2011). As Obama argued, civility is seen as a tool for improving democratic life; it enables deliberation, translates disagreement into dialogue, and has a positive impact on the well-being of citizens and civil society. Incivility, on the other hand, is commonly associated with polarization. It undermines our mutual respect for each other and leads to gridlock, a loss of legitimacy, and a decline in trust in government (Forni, 2010; Mutz, 2015). Political elites in Western Europe are also concerned about the rise of incivility in their own countries. In the wake of Brexit, after both sides had accused each other of lying, alarmist rhetoric, and racism, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called for the British people to work towards regaining “mutual respect and civility” (Shapiro, 2016; Staff, 2016). After terrorist attacks wracked Paris in 2015, the government instituted “civility lessons” for schoolchildren, aimed at improving their understanding of French values and giving “pupils a real idea of how to live together” (Willsher, 2015). The hope seemed to be that a renewed commitment to reasoned, respectful dialogue, and the absence of name-calling, obscenities, lying, and exaggeration would reduce political violence and help heal partisan divisions. Increasingly, research into the presence and effects of incivility extends outside of the United States and Western Europe, examining its effects around the world. As research moves beyond Western cases, however, scholars encounter both methodological and normative challenges. First, while the purpose of civility–to encourage mutual respect and bridge differences of opinion–does not change, its form does. This is true across countries and also within them; what is civil to a New Yorker could be

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20  Flores, Nair, Rasmussen and Sydnor perceived as the complete opposite by someone in Ohio or Alabama, and behaviors labeled as uncivil by the British could be perfectly within the boundaries of Brazilian political discourse. In order to account for these differences, measures of civility and incivility need to be redefined across languages, nations, and political cultures. This acknowledgement of diversity in our understanding and identification of the concept, however, opens up a normative question. As measures of civility vary across countries and cultures, the concept itself can become a tool of oppression, silencing the disagreement that is vital to the democratic flow of ideas. As civility is strategically deployed for anti-democratic ends, incivility can also take on new potential as a tool for equality, representation, and minority rights. In this chapter, we argue that research into comparative (in)civility needs to consider two questions: how do we know what is civil and how do we know if civil or uncivil acts are in line with the values of liberal democracy? To answer these questions, we first review the research on the effects of incivility in the United States and Europe and investigate the roots of civility in Western democracy. We then show that standard American measures of incivility are imperfect measures of the same concept in other countries, using China as an example. Finally, we look at state attempts to co-opt civility for anti-democratic ends and activists’ use of incivility to improve the quality of democracy.

Learning to be uncivil Across contexts, the political environment shapes the presence and perception of incivility and facilitates citizens’ own adoption of uncivil rhetoric. In his “social learning theory,” Bandura (1977; 2002) argues that individuals make behavioral choices by watching others’ interactions with their environments and adapting on the basis of the positive or negative outcomes of those interactions. In the United States, this habit has manifest in online discussant participants’ mimicry of the group’s tone–a negative overall cast to a conversation will lead specific people to use negative language in the own comments (Price, Nir and Cappella, 2006)–and in consumers increased willingness to be uncivil after being exposed to incivility on television talk shows or online discussion forums (Gervais, 2011; Gervais, 2015). European and Latin American researchers have found similar evidence of modeling behavior; Marcelo Jenny finds that as Austrian citizens see hostile and angry language being used by members of the Austrian government, they begin to assume that using that language is the way to best participate in politics (Jenny, Haselmayer and Rdukowsky, 2017). Hungarian politicians describe their competitors using hostile language because these negative comparisons are believed to paint the politicians as holding higher moral standing than their opponents; this, in turn, should encourage Hungarian citizens to vote for them, but instead leaves those same citizens disappointed and disgusted with their

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Challenges in study of political incivility 21 government (DeBell, 2014). Commenters on Chilean news sites that were exposed to flaming and uncivil comments built up a “normalized attitude towards aggressiveness and flaming online” (Rosenberg, 2017). As politicians throughout the world are continually shown fighting and yelling at one another rather than talking, citizens begin to think that this is the appropriate way to participate in political situations as well. Ultimately, when elected officials and members of the media use uncivil language to discuss politics or their political opponents, they are teaching citizens that name-calling and vitriol are an acceptable part of political conversation. Political incivility proliferates because citizens mimic the incivility of political elites, but the media around the world facilitate this modeling behavior. As cable news and the internet have cemented the 24-hour news cycle, incivility has become an increasing part of political communication and online political communication in particular (Geer, 2012; Berry and Sobieraj, 2014). Research suggests that online forums and comment sections on news sites around the world have the potential to produce fruitful discussion (Coe, Kenski, and Rains, 2014; Papacharissi, 2004; Rossini, 2019; Torres da Silva, 2013). However, affordances of the technology itself–its speed, simplicity, anonymity, de-individuation, the ability to combine text, audio and video–make it easier for individuals to deploy uncivil rhetoric and more likely that they’ll perceive rhetoric as uncivil (Chen, 2017; Sydnor, 2017). And once incivility is out there, exposure to it makes people more likely to critique the original poster or engage in flaming–uninhibited (and frequently aggressive) reactions to a real or perceived aggressive comment (Hmielowski, Hutchens, and Cicchirillo, 2014; Rosenberg, 2017). Beyond this cycle in which incivility begets more incivility, the ease with which individuals can hurl insults and nasty language at members of the government or at each other has negative effects on journalism and on government around the world. A study of uncivil Tweets directed at members of the British Parliament found that while men receive more abuse on Twitter, 86% of hate speech directed at Members of Parliament is toward female elected officials (McLoughlin and Ward, 2017). Chen et al interviewed female journalists in five countries–Germany, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States–and found that “they appeared to be trying to strike an uneasy balance between what they see as their journalistic jobs while protecting themselves from abuse” (2020, pp.10). They find that gendered harassment–just one form of online incivility–changed how and what information was presented to citizens. While women in the UK and the US blocked or ignored trolls who harassed them online, women in India and Taiwan became careful about what they posted online, focusing on more positive news in order to minimize online hate speech. Empirical research from around the world suggests that incivility, particularly on the internet, has profoundly impacted the relationship between governments and their citizens, and among citizens within a political community. However, research into comparative incivility needs to consider how

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22  Flores, Nair, Rasmussen and Sydnor scholarly measures of civility tend to be tied to American and European understandings of the concept. In the next section, we argue that a true comparative understanding of incivility must acknowledge the Western roots of contemporary definitions of the concept and the limitations that arise when applying a Western concept to other cultures.

The western roots of incivility and its application abroad The roots of civility are strong and deep, reaching from the Greeks and Romans who structured entire empires around civility to ancient Chinese theorists who conceptualized municipal harmony through humanism; however, the concept is frequently understood as originating in early modernity and the European Renaissance (Bejan, 2017). Building on Aristotle’s idea of the koinōnía politikē´ or “civil society,” liberal political theorists incorporated ideas about interactions between people who disagree into their visions of the state-citizen relationship (Schmidt, 1998). Even though eminent thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Roger Williams differed in their characterization of the concept, they agreed that the success of political communities and societies relied on democratic civility. While a commitment to civil discourse and mutual toleration has contributed to the success and resilience of liberal democratic society, these early conceptions suggest that civil discourse is necessarily restrictive, reinforcing, and privileging the status quo. Locke defined civility as a “disposition of the mind not to offend others” (Bejan 2017, pp.133). But the line around what offends others and appropriate ways to disagree is drawn by those who dictate social and cultural norms of behavior. Chafe, in his discussion of the American civil rights movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, writes that “Blacks also understood the other side of civility–the deferential poses they had to strike in order to keep jobs, the chilling power of consensus to crush efforts to raise issues of racial justice. As victims of civility, blacks had long been forced to operate within an etiquette of race relationships that offered almost no room for collective self-assertion and independence” (1980, pp.8-9). Norms of civility served to undermine other democratic commitments to freedom and equality; African-Americans couldn’t advocate for greater political, economic, and social rights without offending others and placing themselves outside of the boundaries of civil discourse. Sarat offers a more encompassing definition than that of Locke, defining “liberal civility” as “the set of habits of speaking and listening that make passionate debate possible and sustainable, the habits that allow us to disagree and to tolerate the disagreeableness involved in doing so.” (Sarat, 2014, pp.9). To Sarat, civility is not found solely in the attempt to avoid offense, but the recognition that people that disagree will inevitably offend each other. By establishing habits and boundaries for acceptable discourse, disagreement, and offense will remain productive components of political life. Just as with Locke’s definition, however, there is a question of who

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Challenges in study of political incivility 23 determines appropriate habits. Because this responsibility has traditionally been assumed by European nations, communities in other regions of the world, like the Middle East or Southeast Asia, are perceived as “less civil” because they do not follow the social and political guidelines of Western liberal democracies. As Volpi explains, “citizens [in Middle Eastern countries] are seen to be too concerned with religious, ethnic, tribal, and other communal identities to be able to recreate the kind of civic space that historically was obtained in Western societies” (2011, pp.828). Most ideas of what it means to be civil are derived from a Western ideal that has become normalized and internalized, a remnant of colonial conquest and ambition. In the next section of our cross-cultural examination, we identify some of the ways that incivility manifests in different political environments. If, as Yanfang Wu writes, incivility means “breaking the social norms, disrespect, impoliteness, or bad manners that do harm to civil society,” we would expect that the standard ways of operationalizing and measuring incivility in the United States or Western Europe would not apply universally because of variation in these state-level norms (2005, pp.113). While the broad definition of civility and its application to democratic processes may remain constant, the form civility takes – the manners, habits, and features that allow civil society to flourish – should vary according to the history and culture of each polity. In the United States, measures of incivility take two typical forms. They can focus on the tone of communication, identifying, and isolating “features of discussion that convey an unnecessarily disrespectful tone toward the discussion forum, its participants, or its topics” (Coe, Kenski, and Rains, 2014). Specifically, incivility manifests as language that is seen as outside the boundaries of polite face-to-face conversation: racial slurs, obscenities, sarcasm, name-calling, and belittling, to name a few (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014; Gervais, 2015; Thorson and Wells, 2015). Alternatively, incivility can be identified in the substance of a message. Papacharissi (2004) distinguishes incivility from impoliteness, arguing that incivility requires threats to democracy, the assigning of stereotypes or threats to others’ rights. For example, questioning someone’s patriotism or commenting on their racial background or sexual orientation would qualify as incivility under Paracharissi’s definition. In the section below, we examine whether these types of measures can be applied elsewhere, particularly in China.

What counts as uncivil in China? The Chinese language emphasizes relationships, both personal and hierarchical. Chinese Harmony Theory highlights nine major values in Chinese culture and language: humanism, appropriateness, ritual, time and schedules, relationships, movement, hierarchy, face, and power (Chen, 2001). These values are crucial to understanding how the Chinese culture conceives of civility. Humanism, appropriateness, ritual, time, and face emphasize respect for family and interpersonal relationships, while hierarchy and power speak to

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24  Flores, Nair, Rasmussen and Sydnor each individual’s civic duty or obligation to state. For example, the Chinese language contains multiple words for ‘Aunt’ depending on which side of the family they are on and to whom they are married. There is even a word for ‘Aunt’ used to address mothers of close friends, even if there is no blood relation. Civil discourse acknowledges and evokes these values, while incivility manifests as a violation of these rituals, respect for elders, or hierarchies. Whether an individual is speaking to a strong tie (like a family member or close friend) or weak tie in her social network will affect their willingness to express disagreement and the way in which they do so. Francis L. F. Lee (2009) found that residents of Hong Kong were not afraid to engage in deliberative democracy and disagreement when discussing politics with their close friends and family. However, while individuals were willing to have contentious political conversations with their friends, this level of deliberative disagreement does not extend into the Asian workplace. Yeung and Griffin’s cross-cultural study on workplace incivility found that in most of the countries and regions studied (China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore) networks and guanxi (personal relationships) are very important to workplace accomplishments (Yeung and Griffin, 2008). Offensive and humiliating (uncivil) behavior is socially undesirable because it costs the company, both in terms of moral and money. This implies that within China, the habits and manners that define civil conduct may differ depending on the existing relationships among participants. Even within a given political culture, norms of civility may change over time as generational shifts in politics, technology, and culture are reflected in interpersonal relationships. While the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China) has traditionally valued collectivism, a philosophy that emphasizes the well-being of the group over the individual, public policy has begun to erode that norm. Clark and her colleagues argue that the 1979 “one child per family” policy has created “millions of maladapted and over-indulged single children” and that as a result, “moral ethics and traditional Chinese values [have] eroded” (Clark et al., 2010, pp.137). As these children began to change Chinese societal tradition, they also challenged the traditional Chinese educational system. Educational incivility at a university level spiked as changes in Chinese society increased conflict between a traditional system of values and a generation of young, self-attentive students (Clark et al., 2010). Harmony, collectivism, and respect for family still delineate the contours of incivility in Chinese culture, even as these norms evolve in practice in the 21st century. These norms are particularly relevant for those who want to measure incivility in Chinese discourse (and potentially Asian political communication more generally). In his study of discussion in an online chatroom about Chinese politics, Yanfang Wu (2015) applies the coding scheme developed by Jamieson identifies (1997) for identifying incivility in the American context. Jamieson and her colleagues identify seven types of uncivil language: name-calling, aspersion, hyperbole, synonyms for “lie,” non-cooperation,

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Challenges in study of political incivility 25 pejorative words, and vulgarity. Wu finds that vulgarity, pejorative words for speech, and derogatory language are the most frequent categories of incivility in the forum (Wu, 2015). However, other categories that were present in American content analysis of incivility were missing from the Chinese discussion forums. Where Americans tend to perceive hyperbole as exaggeration of some underlying truth, the Chinese think of it as a form of lying–by exaggerating, you are distorting the truth. They do not distinguish between lying and hyperbole. The absence of “non-cooperation,” Wu hypothesizes, could be because the concept is difficult to identify from language rather than action. But he also expects less non-cooperation in the Chinese forum because of the cultural emphasis on collectivism. Wu also noted that new categories could be applied to the online debate: ‘allusion’ and ‘curse’ are themes of incivility that are more frequent in Chinese culture than Western society and were missing from Jamieson and colleagues’ codebook (Wu, 2015). An allusion can be uncivil language when it refers to historical, mythological, or religious stories that paint the target of the incivility in a negative light. “Cursing,” on the other hand, conveys a desire that supernatural powers inflict harm or a burden upon the recipient, most often involving family (e.g. the sender of the uncivil comment might inflict a curse upon the recipient’s children or honor). Takembeng activists in Cameroon also use these types of incivility, cursing, or performing rituals to spiritually inflict harm upon their political adversaries (Diduk, 2004). Neither cursing nor allusions are typically captured by Western measures of incivility. Wu’s investigation into uncivil comments in a Chinese online forum suggests that empirical studies of incivility in different national contexts must recognize that measures with high content validity in the United States or the United Kingdom might not have similar validity in other countries. In part, these differences stem from variation in the use of language; “curses,” which are rarely used in the United States, are a powerful insult in Chinese culture, while hyperbolic exaggeration is a distinction in the United States that disappears in China. Researchers need to be thoughtful about how they apply definitions and operationalizations of civility and incivility across states and political cultures and recognize that there is not a “one-size fits all” approach to the concepts. However, we also need to pay attention to the ways in which these concepts can be co-opted for anti-democratic ends. State construction of discursive norms and acceptable speech maintains the social structures and hierarchies currently in place. In turn, this leaves many marginalized populations stuck, with limited abilities to participate in politics due to their social standing. Some have found creative ways in which to act in an uncivil manner, breaking the norms created for them in order to construct an arena for an unconventional mode of participation. Thus, it is important to keep in mind the need to be specific in the study of political incivility, as the concept can be strategically deployed to reinforce the status quo or in attempts to disrupt it. In the next sections, we offer several examples from different countries of both types of strategy.

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The misalignment of civility and liberal democracy Governments that create a model for civility do so in a way that promotes only certain kinds of behavior or lifestyles. For example, the strong Islamic tradition in many Middle Eastern countries shapes community norms and distinguishes between civil and uncivil language and behaviors. Jordanian Chief Justice Shaykh Iz al-Din al-Tamimi summarized the ties between Islam and civility in the 2004 Amman Message, which “emphasized the need to re-assert Islam’s core values of compassion, respect, tolerance, acceptance, and freedom of religion” (Browers, 2011, pp.945). Similar to the values outlined in the Chinese Harmony Theory, the Amman Message reveals that mutual respect and toleration of disagreement or divergent views are key to the practice of Islam. As students of the relationship between civility and democratic liberalism, we must be attuned to the difference between norms of civility that are constructed around long-standing cultural values, and norms of civility that are imposed by political leaders as a tool of social control. However, the centrality of civil discourse to Islamic values is also co-opted by authoritarian regimes with a motivation to safeguard their interests, and thus construct rules of society for their respective people. As Emma Murphy argues, authoritarian regimes attempt to consolidate their power through strict regulation of media in the name of ‘civility’ (Murphy, 2011). The autocratic governments in the Middle East attempt to justify their strict rule by declaring the people, culture, and governments of neighboring countries (and their own) uncivil so that authoritarian rule seems like an appropriate way to prevent incivility. Murphy writes, “To legitimize its grab for control, the state has co-opted conservative social forces and incorporated widespread, albeit exclusionary, cultural preferences. Pluralism, and tolerance of pluralism, have too often been sacrificed in order to create an official, national cultural code which endorses the interventionist role of the state on the grounds that national and cultural security are both in jeopardy and in need of the state’s protection” (Murphy, 2011, pp.977). In other words, authoritarian rulers in the Middle East argue that civility is required of citizens of any state and dissent is equivalent to incivility. They can then use this logic to quash dissenting rhetoric or challenges to their own authority. Volpi takes this argument about the silencing power of norms of civility a step further, arguing that a commitment to civil discourse facilitates state violence by making it easier to lash out against those who challenge the government. He writes, “The civility argument applied to such ‘uncivil’ societal forces is thus part of a discursive strategy that not only serves to exclude those agents and practices that are not deemed to be appropriate for liberal modernity, but which also validates the use of ‘legitimate’ violence against those recalcitrant groups. The use of force is commonly justified by

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Challenges in study of political incivility 27 the need to defend the state (against the perils of anarchy) and liberal democracy (against the threat of illiberalism and authoritarianism” (Volpi, 2011, pp.830). Volpi’s claim that nations strategically use the maintenance of civility as a foundation for the legitimizing of state violence is evidenced in the relationship between the Egyptian government and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest political Islamist group in the world. Founded in Egypt, it adopted a mandate of democracy in 1995 and espouses social responsibility and social support as a means to reform existing political systems in the Arab world (Al Jazeera Staff, 2017). Despite a large presence in Egyptian politics, the group is not allowed any representation in media, whereas attacks against it on television or radio are commonplace. This exemption of a political entity from representation is justified by the fact that “there isn’t something called the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian Law” (Murphy, 2011, pp.970). Because the Muslim Brotherhood is a banned group in Egypt, every action they take is immediately uncivil–outside of the law and outside of civil society. The demarcation that the Egyptian government seeks is therefore one where civility is equated with support for the current regime; accordance with this definition of civil speech is rewarded with privilege and visibility, while groups deemed a danger to the state are marginalized and denied a place in Egyptian discourse. The Egyptian criminal justice system offers additional insight into the power of government to define civil discourse in a way that maintains the status quo. Salwa Ismail argues that citizens in Cairo form their idea of a civil citizen by observing the illegal and discriminatory practices carried out by law enforcement. She describes the Egyptian conception of civility as “a consensus about modes and manners of conduct that are considered correct, apropos, or benefiting in relation to a given situation” (Ismail, 2011, pp.845-46). From this perspective, acts that would seem uncivil in the average Western democracy–for example, extralegal activities–can qualify as “mundane civilities” because of the relationship between citizen and state. Ismail finds that the people of Egypt are more likely to work outside of the law because time and time again police and other law enforcement have shown that they are willing to discriminate against certain types of citizens. Many young men in Egypt have been arrested and detained for days and weeks at a time for merely looking at a police officer the wrong way or appearing “suspicious.” Not only do the police have an unfair advantage in carrying out the law however they deem fit, but Ismail also demonstrates that citizens with certain political influence or relationships have a higher standing and pull with the police department than others. Through different case studies, Ismail shows how citizens believe they can get away with certain crimes because of the relationships they have with those in politics. Similarly, Jamaican Dons and garrisons call into question if a perfect civil society can even exist while there will always be communities centered

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28  Flores, Nair, Rasmussen and Sydnor around crime within each society. As Johnson explains, “In Jamaica, ‘community dons’ (also known as ‘area leaders’) refer to prominent citizens within the informal sphere, with controlling and often menacing authority in inner city areas, many of which are labeled ‘garrisons’…in its most extreme form, a garrison is a ‘totalitarian social space,’ ‘a political stronghold,’ a veritable fortress in which the lives of those who live within its boundaries are effectively controlled” (Figueroa, 1994, pp.5 cited in Johnson, 2005, pp.582). The garrisons represent pockets of uncivil behaviors and lifestyles. Jamaican culture also places value on protest and public displays of dissent; it is possible to view these acts of physical rebellion as uncivil, just as the dons and their communities of crime are seen as uncivil. Lawlessness does not indicate an uncivilized population just as strict authoritarian rule does not indicate total civility.

Deploying incivility for democratic ends The construction of a civil society inevitably leads some to be defined as “cast-offs” or “others” not welcome in the political or social community. Being outside of society prevents citizens from participating in politics by traditional means, often making them feel as though they have no voice in politics. The following section explores how dissident groups worldwide have confronted this, and strategically used incivility to break norms and gain a political voice. For some underprivileged populations in Latin America, traditional modes of political participation are neither accessible nor effective. Many areas of Jamaica are governed by an outside political force, a “donmanship” of area leaders, or ‘dons’ who are the extra-governmental leaders who in some cases exert a stronger force than an actual governing body. The “people on the margins” are cast outside of civil society and into a different space with a different rule of law and justice than their legal counterparts. However, dons play a large role in the organization of the areas that they exert control, and create an informal sphere of participation that is open to those without traditional means of participation. The collective poor sometimes see “street protests as a first and sometimes only resort in the search for redress” (Johnson, 2005, pp.588). Collective action is thus the most powerful available method of participation. In response, the Jamaican state intervenes in unconventional ways to disrupt this collective action, and the media give more attention to the ‘spectacle’ of protest than its political message, the “channeling a community’s concern” (Johnson, 2005, pp.588). Political incivility takes a different shape in Cameroon – and that shape is postmenopausal female farmers who strip naked, defecate publicly, and parade around in groups. In acting this way, a jarring visual makes for an even stronger statement. If the rural women of Cameroon are not heard or addressed in a conventional political space, they act elsewhere to cement their influence on the state of Cameroon. The group, called Takembeng,

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Challenges in study of political incivility 29 refuses to align with a specific political party yet has been successful in making a strong political and emotional statement in opposition to Cameroon’s government through their use of feminine “essentialism”—women’s association with the earth and fertility. By not allying with the Social Democratic Front (SDF, a leading opposition party in Cameroon), but supporting its ideals, Takembeng has become an important player in Cameroon politics, based on their strategic deployment of seemingly uncivil behavior (Diduk, 2004, pp.40). These women protest corruption, unlawful behavior, abuse of authority, and human rights violations, and this form of activism is not unique to Cameroon. There have been thousands of large and long protests against colonial power by African women in many parts of the subcontinent. As Diduk writes: African women have historically displayed their nakedness to show their utter anger and outrage at both public injustice and private male brutality…many observers of social movements across Africa have noted that women intentionally remove clothing to reveal their sexual organs, cover themselves with leaves, color their faces with wood ash, and wear dirty clothes…as with keluh and fombuen, they affirm existing political and religious institutions, celebrate women’s spiritual authority, and assert their moral obligation to act on behalf of community welfare” (2004, pp.36). These women establish themselves as moral guardians of African communities. They connect to their physicality, sexuality, and womanhood in order to abandon social decorum as a form of protest. This type of protest also propels them onto the national political stage, giving them a podium to address issues. The physical values held dear in African cultures are greatly reflected in these “uncivil” acts, and the acts themselves augment the women’s political voice. This need to use non-traditional and at times “uncivil” forms of political participation is not unique to Jamaica or countries with extra-governmental power hierarchies. Leti Volpp argues that DREAMers–immigrants who were brought to the US illegally before the age of 16–face the same challenge in making their voices heard. Civility, from her perspective, is used much the same way Chafe argued that it was deployed in the Jim Crow South: as a silencing tactic. She writes “Here, noncitizens are told, you need to learn our rules. This is our house. You are not an invited guest, you are a trespasser. If we let you stay, you need to learn how to behave” (Volpp, 2014, pp.105). Civility is used to maintain the status quo; non-citizen immigrants, even those who have lived in the United States their entire lives, do not have the same political voice as citizens. When these immigrants make claims on the state, they are forced to use uncivil language and other means to make their voices heard because they cannot convey their political interests

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30  Flores, Nair, Rasmussen and Sydnor through the voting booth. The interplay as these undocumented individuals make demands of the government demonstrates the dangers of civility and the paradox of incivility in democracy. On the one hand, civility is being used to silence groups that were already at the margins of US society–an inherently anti-democratic act. On the other hand, incivility–the scourge of deliberative democrats everywhere–is being used by noncitizens to create a democratic space.

Conclusion Republican governance demands a standard of civility, recognizing individuals’ right to have contrary opinions while expecting them to avoid ad hominem attacks. Deliberative democracy is marked by a commitment to civil discourse as well; ideally, “one seeks agreement when it is possible and maintains mutual respect when it is not” (Ferree et al., 2002, pp.302). However, the research outlined above suggests that this perception of civility as solely a normative good for government is misguided. As Zerilli notes, “While some forms of civil behavior may be essential to democratic deliberation, acts of “incivility” and contestation may also be an important part of broadening democracy and empowering excluded groups” (Zerilli, 2014, pp.109). Across the world and throughout history, we see examples of incivility being used to achieve better democratic outcomes–greater representation, inclusivity, and minority rights. At the same time, we see those in power–in democratic governments as well as authoritarian or extra-legal forces–changing the definition of civil language and behavior in order to reinforce their place in the social and political hierarchy. Civility can be a dangerous tool, a way to condone oppression of minority groups for the sake of maintaining a ‘good civil society.’ We draw on theoretical and qualitative evidence of the strategic deployment of incivility here, but believe that future research should consider strategies for empirically testing these claims in a comparative perspective. Experiments, whether in the field or in the lab, could test the effects of labeling particular behaviors as civil or uncivil. They could also explore the effectiveness of uncivil protest and the moderating effects of the type of person making uncivil claims. Presumably, these findings will vary by country, and future research could consider the impact of various institutions or forms of government on the decision to use uncivil rhetoric. As comparative political communication scholars take on these projects, they must also heed the other argument we make in this piece. One measure of incivility does not fit all. Measures of incivility that arise from American political communication research may not adequately capture the extent of uncivil language in other countries. As evidenced by our discussion of incivility in China, concepts like hyperbole are more present in US discourse than in Chinese. But Asian and African cultures have other ways of indicating incivility–for example, cursing someone to never bear a son–that are

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Challenges in study of political incivility 31 rarely used in the United States or Western Europe. As we make claims about the effects of incivility on political behavior and attitudes, we must be aware of the extent to which the measures we are using accurately reflect the way that incivility is conveyed and construed in the countries being studied. After all, while Americans hold up the 1856 Brooks-Sumner affair, in which US Representative Preston Brooks (D-SC) used a walking cane to attack Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, as the ultimate in uncivil behavior, Taiwanese parliamentarians regularly engage in brawls in the legislative Yuan. In 2017, legislators threw chairs at each other as they fought over an infrastructure spending bill; an acceptable strategy to “show their constituents they’re working hard to fight for their cause” (Sui, 2017). By pushing beyond the limits of theoretical definitions and measures of civility that are tied to Western democracy, we can broaden the range of scholarship on when and under what conditions civility and incivility produce more effective democracy.

References Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Bandura, A. (2002). Social Cognitive Theory of Mass Communication, in: Bryant, J., Zillman, D. (Eds.), Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, N.J., pp. 121–153. Bejan, T. (2017). Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Berry, J.M., Sobieraj, S. (2014). The outrage industry: political opinion media and the new incivility. Oxford University Press, Oxford; New York. Browers, M. (2011). Official Islam and the Limits of Communicative Action: the Paradox of the Amman Message. Third World Quarterly, 32, 943–958. Chafe, W.H. (1980). Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom. Oxford University Press, New York. Chen, G.M. (2001). Toward transcultural understanding: A harmony theory of Chinese communication, in: Transcultural Realities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Relations. Sage Publications, Inc, Thousand Oaks, CA, US, pp. 55–70. Chen, G.M. (2017). Nasty Talk: Online Incivility and Public Debate. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland. Chen, G.M., Pain, P., Chen, V.Y., Mekelburg, M., Springer, N., Troger, F. (2020). ‘You really have to have a thick skin’: A cross-cultural perspective on how online harassment influences female journalists. Journalism 21(7), 877–895. Clark, C.M., Otterness, N.S., Jun, W.Y., Allerton, B.W., Juan, C.M., Black, M., Wei, F. (2010). Descriptive study of student incivility in the People’s Republic of China. Journal of Cultural Diversity, 17, 136–143. Coe, K., Kenski, K., Rains, S.A. (2014). Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments. Journal of Communication, 64, 658–679.

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32  Flores, Nair, Rasmussen and Sydnor De Pinto, J., Backus, Fred, Khanna, K., Salvanto, A. (2017). Poll: Americans say U.S. political debate is increasingly uncivil. CBS News. DeBell, P.A. (2014). The politics of outrage: Anger and disgust in Hungarian party politics and public opinion*. Presented at the Political Behavior Research Group at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, p. 17. Diduk, S. (2004). The Civility of Incivility: Grassroots Political Activism, Female Farmers, and the Cameroon State. African Studies Review, 47, 27–54. Ferree, M.M., Gamson, W.A., Gerhards, J., Rucht, D. (2002). Four Models of the Public Sphere in Modern Democracies. Theory and Society, 31, 289–324. Figueroa, M. (1994). Garrison Communities in Jamaica 1962-1993: their growth and impact on political culture, in: Symposium, Democracy and Democratization in Jamaica: Fifty Years of Adult Suffrage. Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, Kingston, Jamaica, pp. 6–7. Fisher, M. (2017). When a shooting hits the people’s House. Washington Post. Forni, P.M. (2010). Why civility is necessary for society’s survival [WWW Document]. Dallas News. URL https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/ 2010/07/23/p.m.-forni-why-civility-is-necessary-for-society_s-survival (accessed 6.15.18). Geer, J.G. (2012). The News Media and the Rise of Negativity in Presidential Campaigns. PS: Political Science and Politics, 45, 422–427. Gervais, B.T. (2011). The Effects of Incivility in News Media on Political Deliberation: The mimicry of uncivil language in political opinions. Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. Gervais, B.T. (2015). Incivility Online: Affective and Behavioral Reactions to Uncivil Political Posts in a Web-based Experiment. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 12, 167–185. Gorrell, G., Greenwood, M., Roberts, I., Maynard, D., Bontcheva, K. (2018). Online Abuse of UK MPs in 2015 and 2017: Perpetrators, Targets, and Topics. arXiv:1804.01498 [cs]. Herbst, S. (2011). Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics. Temple University Press, Philadelphia. Hmielowski, J.D., Hutchens, M.J., Cicchirillo, V.J. (2014). Living in an age of online incivility: examining the conditional indirect effects of online discussion on political flaming. Information, Communication & Society, 17, 1196–1211. Ismail, S., (2011). Authoritarian Government, Neoliberalism and Everyday Civilities in Egypt. Third World Quarterly, 32, 845–862. Jamieson, K.H. (1997). Civility in the House of Representatives (No. 10). Annenberg Public Policy Center, Philadelphia. Jenny, M., Haselmayer, M., Rdukowsky, E. (2017). Incivility in Austrian Parliamentary Debates: A supervised sentiment analysis of parliamentary speeches. Presented at the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Workshops, Nottingham, U.K. Johnson, H.N. (2005). Incivility: The Politics of ‘People on the Margins’ in Jamaica. Political Studies, 53, 579–597. Lee, F.L.F. (2009). The Impact of Political Discussion in a Democratizing Society: The Moderating Role of Disagreement and Support for Democracy. Communication Research, 36(3), 379–399.

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Challenges in study of political incivility 33 McLoughlin, L., Ward, S. (2017). Turds, Traitors and Tossers: The Abuse of UK MPs via Twitter. Presented at the European Consortium of Political Research Joint Sessions, Nottingham, U.K. Murphy, E.C. (2011). The Arab State and (Absent) Civility in New Communicative Spaces. Third World Quarterly, 32, 959–980. Mutz, D.C. (2015). In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Mutz, D.C., Reeves, B. (2005). The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust. American Political Science Review, 99, 1–15. Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy Online: Civility, Politeness, and the Democratic Potential of Online Political Discussion Groups. New Media and Society 259–283. Price, V., Nir, L., Cappella, J.N. (2006). Normative and Informational Influences in Online Political Discussions. Communication Theory, 16, 47–74. Rosenberg, A. (2017). Nasty Discussion: An Overview on Flaming and Incivility in News Comments Sections. Presented at the IAMCR 2017 Conference, Cartagena, Colombia. Rossini, P. (2019). Disentangling Uncivil and Intolerant Discourse in Online Political Talk, in: Boatright, R.G., Shaffer, T.J., Sobieraj, S., Young, D.G. (eds.), A Crisis of Civility?: Political Discourse and Its Discontents. Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 142–157. Sarat, A. (2014). Civility, Legality, and Justice in America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Schmidt, J. (1998). Civility, Enlightenment, and Society: Conceptual Confusions and Kantian Remedies. The American Political Science Review, 92, 419–427. Shapiro, J. (2016). British MP Jo Cox’s murder brought civility to the Brexit debate. It won’t last. [WWW Document]. Vox.com. URL https://www.vox. com/2016/6/20/11963894/british-mp-jo-cox-death (accessed 6.15.18). Staff, (2016). Bishops call for return of ‘mutual respect and civility’ after Brexit vote [WWW Document]. CatholicHerald.co.uk. URL http://www.catholicherald. co.uk/news/2016/06/24/bishops-call-for-return-of-mutual-respect-and-civilityafter-brexit-vote/ (accessed 6.15.18). Al Jazeera Staff, (2017) n.d. What is the Muslim Brotherhood? [WWW Document]. URL https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/06/muslim-brotherhoodexplained-170608091709865.html (accessed 6.15.18). Sui, C. (2017). Why brawls are a way of life in Taiwan politics. BBC News. Swaine, J. (2011). Barack Obama leads memorial service for Arizona shooting victims. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-politics/8256480/BarackObama-leads-memorial-service-for-Arizona-shooting-victims.html (accessed 6.15.18) Sydnor, E. (2017). Platforms for Incivility: Examining Perceptions Across Media. Political Communication, 35, 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2017.1355857 Thorson, K., Wells, C. (2015). Curated Flows: A Framework for Mapping Media Exposure in the Digital Age. Communication Theory, 1–20. Torres da Silva, M. (2013). Online forums, audience participation and modes of political discussion: readers’ comments on the Brazilian presidential election as a case study. Comunicacion y Sociedad, 26, 175–193. Volpi, F. (2011). Framing Civility in the Middle East: alternative perspectives on the state and civil society. Third World Quarterly 32, 827–843.

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34  Flores, Nair, Rasmussen and Sydnor Volpp, L. (2014). Civility and the Undocumented Alien, in: Civility, Legality, and Justice in America. Cambridge University Press, New York. Willsher, K. (2015). France plans civility lessons and ‘secularity day’ after Paris attacks. The Guardian. Wu, Y. (2015). Incivility on Diaoyu Island sovereignty in Tianya Club. The Journal of International Communication, 21, 109–131. Yeung, A., Griffin, B. (2008). Workplace incivility: Does it matter in Asia? People + Strategy, 31, 14–19. Zerilli, L.M.G. (2014). Against Civility: A Feminist Perspective. In Sarat, A. (Ed.), Civility, Legality, and Justice in America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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2

Words that hurt democracy: the sticks and stones of anti-democratic discourse in Hungary and Germany Nicole Lugosi-Schimpf and Lori Thorlakson

Introduction Can words harm democracy? Consider, for instance, a ‘joke’ in which the Czech president suggests that his political rival, the prime minister, be removed from office either by an election or by a Kalashnikov; a campaign rally where the US presidential candidate calls for his opponent to be jailed; or when a British tabloid paper branding judges as ‘traitors’ for their ruling on parliament’s role in Brexit legislation. These are all examples of an extreme form of uncivil discourse, which we call anti-democratic discourse (ADD). While similar to political incivility, anti-democratic discourse is distinct because it represents a normative attack on democracy, by expressing values or support for actions that would undermine liberal democracy. Anti-democratic discourse is related to political incivility, a topic that has received great attention in the political communication literature, due to its potential implications for the quality and functioning of liberal democracy. Lack of civility can erode trust in institutions and decrease the perception of the legitimacy of the opposition (Mutz and Reeves, 2005; Mutz, 2007, Mutz, 2015). Negativity in political discourse can lead to public disengagement with politics and low turnout among moderate voters (Strachan and Wolf, 2012), discourage good candidates from running for office, discourage good representatives from staying in office, and make it difficult to create good policy (Maisel, 2012). Democracy needs social capital and civil discussion, but incivility can threaten these conditions. Polarization, often included in measures of incivility, can impact democracy by leading to a rejection of compromise or consensus in politics and lead to legislative gridlock (Wolf et al, 2012; Jenson et al, 2012). More fundamentally, in extreme cases polarization can erode the shared space of reason that democracies require, including agreement on shared facts and shared standards of evidence (Lynch, 2012). Political incivility in discourse can undermine democratic values, and, ultimately undermine democracy itself (Massaro and Stryker, 2012; Coe et al, 2014, Stryker et al, 2016). Research in political science and communication studies has pointed to a number of factors to explain the rise of incivility. Polarized partisanship can

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36  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson give rise to partisan attacks on certain issues as well as more generally suppressing the public’s appetite for compromise in policy-making and mutual respect in discourse (Wolf et al, 2012; Coe et al, 2014). Other researchers have pointed to contextual factors such as changes in media structure, including the rise of social media and, in the US, the eclipse of traditional network news by cable news networks, which operate under a different regulatory structure (Sobieraj and Berry, 2011; Berry and Sobieraj, 2013). By contrast, the question of why, when and how anti-democratic discourse emerges and persists is likely broader and more complicated, requiring us to also draw on the literature on democratic backsliding, which stresses structural and institutional factors. In this chapter, we employ comparative case studies to elaborate some of the broader contextual factors that may facilitate the emergence of ADD. This paper focuses on three of these in particular: the role of populism and party system change, the use of external threats, and the institutional structure. We use case studies of Hungary and Germany to elaborate the concept of anti-democratic discourse and explore how these contextual factors affect anti-democratic discourse. Hungary and Germany offer wide variation across the three contextual facilitating conditions that we have identified from the political incivility and democratic backsliding literatures. Hungary can be considered to be a most-likely case for the development of anti-democratic discourse: its democratic norms and institutions are newer, and therefore likely to be more vulnerable to erosion. The strategies and rhetoric of its governing party have frequently included populist strategies and the mobilization of threats. In contrast, Germany represents a leastlikely case, due to its strong democratic institutions and norms, including strict laws on hate speech and anti-democratic speech. It is a political context that has generally been hostile to populist strategies. Both cases that we have chosen are democracies, as we are interested in the role of anti-democratic discourse in the processes of democratic backsliding. This chapter first introduces the concept of anti-democratic discourse within the context of the wider literature on political incivility as well as the literature on democratic backsliding. After defining the basic features of ADD, we present three contextual conditions that we believe are theoretically meaningful to the development of anti-democratic discourse: populism, threat mobilization, and the strength of rights-protecting institutions. Using the case studies of Germany and Hungary, we investigate how these contextual conditions impact the extent, severity, and source of ADD, as well as the timing of its emergence. We conclude by setting out an agenda for future empirical research.

Concepts and definitions: incivility and anti-democratic discourse The concept of anti-democratic discourse is closely related to the idea of political incivility and can be considered to be a specific sub-set of uncivil political discourse. What, then, is political incivility?

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 37 What is uncivil discourse? Political incivility can be understood both as a one-off behavior or speech (civility) as well as an ongoing pattern of interaction (discourse) (Massaro and Stryker, 2012). Like the more general concept of incivility, political incivility is related to the notion of rudeness (Herbst, 2010). However, in contrast to the concept of civility in general, political incivility is specific to the political realm. Because of this, strenuous disagreement, which might be considered uncivil behavior that generates ‘negative face,’ does not necessarily constitute political incivility, as democratic behavior expects and in fact requires robust disagreement (Stryker et al, 2016; Massaro and Stryker, 2012; Papacharissi, 2004). Not only is civil discourse respectful, it is also free (Coe et al, 2014). This hints at a hidden tension within the definition, that between civility as respectful discourse and civility that results from repressive social norms. This is a reason to be cautious about overreliance on rudeness in a definition of political incivility, as this can capture non-conforming behavior that is sometimes necessary when the political goal is to challenge unfair or unjust social orders, such as when civil rights campaigners have employed disruptive politics. Research on political incivility typically includes rudeness as an indicator of uncivil political behavior when it indicates a lack of respect (Mutz and Reeves, 2005; Sobieraj and Berry, 2011), for instance in the case of ad hominem attacks, disrespectful speech, interruptions, or eye-rolling. Stryker et al (2016) go further, and identify three distinct dimensions of the concept: insulting or contemptuous speech and behavior (utterance incivility), speech and behavior that prevents discussion and debate (discursive incivility), and deceptive speech (Stryker et al, 2016, p. 549). This definition, and especially utterance incivility, emphasizes incivility toward persons. This is one area in which our concept of anti-democratic discourse departs from political incivility. Massaro and Stryker (2012) argue that attacks on institutions are less likely to constitute political incivility than attacks on persons. In contrast, we are equally interested, if not more so, on the consequences for democracy of attacks on institutions, and such attacks are central to our concept of anti-democratic discourse. In general terms, political incivility, compared to incivility in general (such as in the workplace or social settings) can be defined by “disrespect for the collective traditions of democracy… operationalized as the set of behaviors that threaten democracy, deny people their personal freedoms, and stereotype social groups” (Papacharissi, 2004, p. 267). Our definition of anti-democratic discourse builds upon this. There is a close linkage between the concept of political (in)civility and democracy. First, civil discourse is linked to the style of interactions needed to support the creation and maintenance of associational life that underpins a healthy democracy (Maisel, 2012; Coe et al, 2014). Civil society, such as understood by Putnam (2000) or Etzioni (1993), is an essential support for

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38  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson pluralism, requires mutual respect and civility. This links civility to democracy in a general way. Political civility is more tightly and directly linked to democracy in models of deliberative democracy, where the respectful and rational argument that is at the core of deliberative understandings of democracy can be threatened by incivility. ‘Deliberative civility’ is essential for the functioning of deliberative democracy (Stryker et al, 2016). There is disagreement over whether emotional language is included in the category of political incivility. While theorists of deliberative democracy emphasize the role of evidence and reason in deliberative discourse, theorists of political incivility recognize a role for emotion in civil political discourse (Stryker et al, 2016; Herbst, 2010). What is anti-democratic discourse? Our definition of anti-democratic discourse has as its roots political incivility: this includes disrespectful or contemptuous speech (Massaro and Stryker, 2012; Stryker et al, 2016), preventing or limiting debate (Coe et al, 2014; Stryker et al, 2016) and deceptive communication (Stryker et al, 2016). The rude or disrespectful discourse that is central to many definitions of political incivility is present, but less central to the definition of anti-democratic discourse. Instead, building on Papacharissi’s definition of political incivility as ‘disrespect for the collective traditions of democracy’ (2004, p. 267), we define antidemocratic discourse as discourse that threatens liberal democracy by eroding the norms that underpin democratic institutions and liberal rights. This can include discourse that attacks or undermines pluralism and the legitimacy of competing viewpoints (such as attacks on the media or questioning the legitimacy of the opposition or competing viewpoints), anti-system discourse that undermines support for democratic institutions or the rule of law, or intolerant discourse that undermines respect for minority rights or groups. This definition is closely related to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s four key indicators of authoritarian behavior (2018, p. 23): attacks on democratic rules, attacks on the legitimacy of political opposition, encouragement of violence, and attacks on civil liberties of opponents. Anti-democratic discourse can be produced by anyone with a role in democratic politics, including politicians, the media, other elites, and citizens. The greatest impacts are likely to be felt when the anti-democratic discourse is created by the powerful. Research has shown that elites are public opinion shapers (Zaller, 1992). In the context of democratic consolidation and backsliding, elites are what Sullivan and Transue call ‘keepers of the creed,’ communicating elite support for the norms of democracy (1999, p. 629). Anti-democratic discourse erodes this normative base. Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) argue that when democracies backslide toward authoritarianism, it occurs through incremental legal shifts underpinned by a gradual process of normative erosion, rather than by

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 39 sudden ruptures. Discursive shifts can be part of this gradual process of normative erosion.

Theorizing the contextual conditions of anti-democratic discourse Under what contextual conditions does anti-democratic discourse occur? Can we relate the form of anti-democratic discourse or its severity to the presence or absence of other facilitating conditions? This section proposes three contextual conditions which can potentially affect the opportunity for the use of ADD or represent institutional constraints to the use of ADD: populism and party system disruption, threat mobilization, and the institutional context. Populism and party system disruption Weak or unstable parties, party system instability and political polarization may also provide opportunities for the emergence of ADD. Populist strategies of party competition are another context that can facilitate anti-democratic discourse. Populist appeals often rely on attacks on the establishment or the elite. Anti-democratic discourse therefore becomes a political strategy. Following Hawkins, we understand populism as a discursive enterprise, that is to say populism is “a set of ideas rather than […] a set of actions isolated from their underlying meanings for leaders and participants” rooted in particular cultural understandings (2009, p. 1043). Populism is characterized by appeals to the ‘common person,’ a ‘politics for the people’ versus some sort of corrupt elite (Mudde, 2004) expressed by a particular discourse strategy and line of argumentation occurring anywhere on the political spectrum (Hawkins, 2009; Blokker, 2005, p. 386). Populism can also pose additional problems for unconsolidated or fragile democracies by fuelling authoritarian-style party competition (Levitsky and Loxton, 2012). The use of inimical constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (LaClau, 2005; Reinfeldt, 2000) can open space for political polarization and deference to a ‘personalist authority’ as seen in Hungary and Greece (Enyedi, 2016; Pappas, 2014, pp. 3-4). The combination of populism and polarization is especially harmful in the context of strong parties, making democratic backsliding more likely (Enyedi, 2016, p. 2). Populism therefore involves a style of competition or political strategy that encourages certain types of anti-democratic discourse: anti-elite sentiment can lead to attacks on democratic institutions, and an emphasis on the ‘will of the people’ generates a linkage with majority rule that can be used to justify the erosion of minority rights and erode pluralism. It is worth noting that populism is not necessarily inherently damaging to democracy, but it can pose problems depending on the circumstances. For instance, Mudde and Kaltwasser (2012) find that populism in opposition can be a positive force by exposing corruption and other sensitive

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40  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson systemic problems. However, populism in government spells trouble for the hallmarks of liberal democracy such as freedom of the press, an autonomous judicial system, protection of civil liberties, and a free and fair election system (Kenny, Hawkins, and Ruth, 2016). The mobilization of threats The presence of threats together with their mobilization in political discourse can also serve as a contextual factor that facilitates ADD. Threat mobilization operates through political rhetoric to create, maintain, and heighten a climate of fear to rally support for extreme measures and solutions to urgent problems. The presence of threats (often external or security threats) provides an opportunity for parties in power to take measures that weaken civil liberties in the name of security. A climate of fear can also provide opportunities for political actors, whether in government or not, to mobilize fear in their rhetoric to increase polarization and cleavages. This is relevant for the study of anti-democratic discourse because a key feature of populist parties on the radical right is a combination of exclusive nationalism and authoritarian politics that often challenge the tenets of liberal democracy (Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2005, Pirro, 2014). For parties to successfully mobilize threats, context and timing matter. For instance, Pytlas’ (2016) work on the populist radical right in Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland expands on the social movement theory of political opportunity structure to also consider discursive opportunity structure (2016: 58). In Hungary, for example, part of Jobbik’s ability to gain electoral ground among disenchanted voters in a seemingly consolidated party system rested on a strategy of vehement anti-Roma rhetoric which painted this marginalized community as inherently criminal and parasitic in a time of contentious Roma politics (Karácsony and Róna, 2011). Jobbik’s scapegoating of the Roma is an example of nationalistic, racist discourse rooted in what Wodak (2015) calls the ‘politics of fear.’ It is important to consider how discourses of threat construct and reproduce the dangerous ‘Other’ and the impact this has on democratic values of protecting minority rights and groups with constant exposure over time to ‘us versus them’ discourses of particular people from particular places as always posing a security problem. Our case studies explore the prevalence of ADD and whether this discourse occurs in a general way or if it tends to be related to specific threats because how threats are articulated also sheds light on the political opportunity structure. Institutional framework Third, we examine the impact of the institutional framework on the manner and extent to which ADD is expressed. The institutional framework can include the degree of constitutionalism (including the observance of

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 41 rule of law and the extent to which the constitution is enforced), general institutional design as well as specific measures that entrench safeguards for liberal democratic rights and processes. It is an interactive process or relationship. Once established, institutions can reinforce norms that shape democratic behavior and specific provisions can create legal limitations on the expression of anti-democratic discourse. Norms, and the public discourse that contributes to sustaining them, can also strengthen the legal framework, maintaining the ‘normative guardrails’ that democracy needs (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). The institutional framework affects the extent to which the norms or conventions that underpin democracy are entrenched in or protected by formal rules. The institutionalization of democratic norms in a legal framework (the record of constitutionalism), and the observance of the rule of law is a key step in democratic consolidation and general indicator of the strength of liberal democratic norms. The constitutional design of the state can also affect the range and strengths of tools available to safeguard minority rights. Institutional elements of consensus democracy safeguard minority rights and safeguard pluralism by structuring multiple channels of input, whether through separation of powers, decentralization, proportional representation electoral rules that generate multiparty systems, or constitutionally entrenched minority rights protections (Lijphart, 1984). Majoritarian systems, by contrast, often safeguard pluralism through strong individual rights, including strong protections for free speech. Specific provisions in constitutional or statute law that protect free speech or restrict hate speech can be particularly important for affecting the scope for anti-democratic discourse.

Anti-democratic discourse in Hungary and Germany We now examine the recent occurrence of anti-democratic discourse in two democratic countries: Germany and Hungary. We provide an overview of the occurrence of four forms of anti-democratic discourse (anti-pluralism, intolerant discourse, deception, and anti-system discourse) along three dimensions: its severity, its temporal extent and patterns, and the actors involved. We identify empirical variations in ADD, and identify the role that the contextual factors of populism, mobilizing threats, and institutions have played. We use these case studies heuristically, to guide theory building on causal processes that affect the emergence of anti-democratic discourse. A. Case study: Hungary Hungary presents an interesting case to explore given the country’s complex history with democracy and regime change. Early attempts to democratize following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 were short-lived. The interwar years were marked with territorial disputes

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42  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson imposed by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 and in the 1930s, Hungary aligned with Italy and Germany. After communist rule was consolidated after the Second World War, there was no public space for democratic dialogue of pluralism or minority rights. The end of communism created an opportunity to redefine the nation and old grievances and tensions rose to the surface. Despite these tensions, Hungary met conditionality benchmarks, acceded to the EU in 2004, and by all institutional measures, had successfully transitioned to democracy. However, it has since stood out in the region for its democratic backsliding. Consequently, it is a most likely case for observing anti-democratic discourse. Types of anti-democratic discourse: All four elements of ADD are present in the Hungarian case, with intolerant discourse most prominent, increasing issues regarding anti-pluralism and anti-system discourses and, to a lesser extent, deception. The Freedom House 2018 Freedom in the World report ranks Hungary 2/4 on the question, “do laws, policies, and practices guarantee equal treatment of various segments of the population?” This is in large part due to the poor treatment of migrants and minorities. The report notes that restrictive asylum policies have resulted in rights violations of refugees and asylum seekers (Freedom House, 2018). The governing party Fidesz and opposition party Jobbik publicly articulate intolerant discourse on party websites and in speeches. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has vehemently opposed migrant protection rights and spoken out against EU-imposed migrant quotas, culminating with a fence erected along the Hungarian-Serbian border to keep migrants out in 2015 followed with anti-migrant billboards erected in the lead up to the 2 October 2016 referendum on migrant quotas. Intolerant discourse targeting the Roma is widespread in Jobbik’s rhetoric. Jobbik’s success as a breakthrough party rested largely on anti-Roma campaigns depicting the Roma as violent and criminally deviant parasites (Jobbik, 2010; Karácsony & Róna, 2011). This discourse continues to resonate and resentment against the Roma persists among fringe media, various members of government, and the public. Respect for pluralism is also a problem. In this area, Freedom House assigns Hungary a score of 12/16 overall, down a point from 2017, citing specific issues regarding the ability for opposition parties to compete, where the score is 3/4. “The score declined from 4 to 3 due to new restrictions on advertising that disproportionately affect the opposition, and frequent smears of opposition politicians in progovernment media outlets” (Freedom House, 2018). The most striking example of anti-system discourse can be summarized in Orbán’s Annual Summer Speech in Tusnádfürdő in 2014 when he declared that the “…Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened, and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state” (Orbán, 2014, para. 11). Lastly, we also find deception in

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 43 Hungarian ADD, as a rhetorical strategy of exaggeration and exacerbation of fear. It tends to occur together with the promotion of ideas that migration is inextricably linked to terrorism and gender violence as seen on the government billboards and second, in the form of Fidesz and their political opponents accusing each other of deceiving and lying to the public. Severity, sources and temporal patterns In Hungary, ADD is severe, with dramatic consequences for a healthy functioning democracy. What we are witnessing now can be understood as a process of ‘de-democratization’ (Ágh, 2016) or ‘populist polarization’ (Enyedi, 2016). Hungary’s fall from democratic grace surprised researchers, as the country once exemplified the pinnacle of transition and consolidation among CEE peers. This puzzle exposed a dearth in the literature to adequately explain the seemingly radical shift that could have been better accounted for with closer attention to discursive shifts (Herman, 2016). ADD comes chiefly from government and opposition parties, namely Fidesz and Jobbik. Jobbik was once an insignificant party on the far right that rose through the electoral ranks starting in 2009. The party campaigned on hyper-nationalist intolerant discourse and included a now out-lawed paramilitary wing, the Magyar Gárda, formed to protect national interests and values (LeBor, 2008). Fidesz once sat at the conservative right, employing ADD mainly through anti-system and anti-plural sentiment. The party is increasingly shifting right with rising levels of intolerant discourse leading to greater alignment between the two parties (Pytlas, 2016, p. 138). Fidesz also has a youth organization, Fidelitas, that closely follows the party’s rhetoric. Since Orbán’s electoral victory in 2010, conditions for a thriving liberal democracy have deteriorated resulting from incremental legal changes, including a redrafting of the constitution that gives Fidesz ever-increasing power over democratic institutions and safeguards. At the discourse level, various forms of ADD have justified these policy maneuvers. In its 2018 report, Freedom House reported an “increasing intimidation of civil society groups and the opposition, which has left citizens more reluctant to speak out on political topics” (Freedom House, 2018). This suggests that anti-pluralism and anti-system discourses are on the rise. Intolerant discourse also appears to have increased over time. Where Roma issues once dominated public and political discourse, hostility towards migrants is now a primary concern that shows no signs of decreasing. This has led to what scholars like Feischmidt and Hervik (2015) refer to as a ‘mainstreaming of the extreme’ where narratives of nationalism and racism are normalized. Contextual conditions of ADD in Hungary: Ágh (1998) notes that post-communist Hungarian politics have always been marked by nationalism (which can breed intolerance) and populism.

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44  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson Populism on its own does not necessarily threaten democracy but Hungary’s radical right version paired with authoritarianism and exclusive nationalism does (cf. Minkenberg, 2013). In Hungary this has occurred in the context of a party system disruption, stemming from the discrediting of the Socialist Party (MSzP) on the left in 2006 in the wake of a scandalous speech by the MSzP Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, in which he admitted that he had lied to the electorate about the country’s economic situation, that was leaked to the press and broadcast, leading to political crisis and public protests (Kósa, 2016). This vacuum on the left has opened space for radical right party competition. With populists in power, political polarization increases resulting in a populist democracy (Pappas, 2014), or in the case of Hungary, an illiberal democracy. Enyedi (2016) takes the concept of polarization further by casting populist polarization as a party system sub-type characterized by institutional change and discursive elements. Such polarization and backlash against liberal values creates conditions for ADD to thrive. While widespread anti-Roma rhetoric featured prominently during Jobbik’s 2010 and 2014 electoral campaigns, since 2015 most of the intolerant discourse has cast migrants and refugees as an inherent threat.1 Leading up to the referendum on migrant quotas imposed by the EU, the Hungarian Government sponsored billboards stating, “Did you know that since the beginning of the migrant crisis, more than 300 people have died in Europe in terror attacks?,” “Did you know that since the beginning of the migrant crisis, harassment towards women has steeply risen in Europe?,” and “Did you know that the Paris attack was carried out by immigrants?” (Budapest Business Journal, 2016). Such framing positions migrants as an external danger prone to terrorism and gender violence, which threatens European values and Hungarian citizens. This discourse is also deceptive, as not all the Paris attackers were migrants but this framing does not make that clear. Events like the migrant and refugee crisis can breed insecurity, which in turn ascribes more legitimacy to populist messages that draw on the need for protection in the face of danger and threat in the name of either political and social order, or the national community. More recently, the migrant debate has shifted to Orbán’s campaign against George Sörös, a Hungarian born Jew who resides in the US and finances projects aimed at promoting liberal democratic values, including open borders, in CEE2. The anti-Sörös discourse is also visible across billboards and media ads saying he must be stopped and that the philanthropist would “settle millions from Africa and the Middle East,” which according to Sörös is a campaign based on “‘distortions and lies’ meant to create a false external enemy” (Than, 2018). An external enemy framed as a traitor exemplifies declarative and expressive securitizing strategies of placing blame to justify hard action to solve the problem (Balzacq, 2005, p. 189). Assigning of blame is also typical of populist strategies of ‘the people’ against corrupt elites. In this way, the

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 45 anti-Sörös campaign signifies multiple elements (intolerance, deception) and factors (populism, mobilizing threat) of ADD. While Hungary does have institutional safeguards to protect democratic norms and practices according to EU requirements, they are weak. Since taking power in 2010, Fidesz redrafted its constitution in 2011 with amendments that seriously erode democracy, consolidating the power of the ruling Fidesz party, threatening pluralism (Herman, 2016), increasing government control over media, and threatening academic freedom. The 2012 Freedom House report on Hungary condemned the new constitution noting that it “…was boycotted by the opposition and was strongly criticized for having been formulated quickly and with little input from civil society. The new constitution places policies on culture, religion, morality, and the economy, including issues such as public debt and pensions, under the category of ‘Cardinal Law’” (Freedom House, 2012). The two-third majority threshold for amending these laws makes it difficult to change and gives the ruling party (Fidesz) a great deal of power to unilaterally make changes. Hungary does have laws regulating speech that targets slander and defamation in the Criminal Code and the Constitution but ambiguities in these legal measures mean they are more likely to protect political elites that use ADD. To illustrate, Article IX of the Constitution protects press freedom and diversity, however, many laws that have been enacted have resulted in ever-tightening control of the media, including print, online, and broadcast. A 2017 Freedom House report expresses concern over government monopoly and influence of media outlets and advertising. The law on defamation was made stricter, increasing possible sentences of up to three years in prison should a video or audio recording be distributed. Government control of content restrictions also subjects online media to blocking. These reforms, among others, have raised concern that media outlets in Hungary are now self-censoring (Freedom House, 2017). Finally, though Article X of the Constitution enshrines academic and research freedom at higher education institutions in Hungary, only the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Academy of Arts are specifically mentioned. Recently, the widely criticized Amendment to Act CCIV of 2011 on National Higher Education in the Hungarian Parliament (2017) presents another facet of the anti-Sörös campaign (Turp, 2018). Sörös founded the Central European University (CEU), an institution with Hungarian and American accreditation. The foreign accreditation exempts CEU from Constitutional protection so the new law could have significant impact. Regarding scores on freedom of expression and belief, Freedom House explains, “The score declined from 3 to 2 due to the adoption of amendments that targeted Central European University, which could be expelled from the country if it does not comply with burdensome new regulations” (Freedom House, 2018). Indeed, following failure to renew the

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46  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson Hungarian-American agreement, CEU has moved all US accredited programs to Vienna, Austria (CEU, 2018). B. Case study: Germany We use Germany as a least-likely case for anti-democratic discourse due to its strong democratic constitutionalism, maintained through institutions that provide strong legal safeguards against anti-democratic speech and behavior as well as strong democratic norms that influence public behavior and prevent democratic backsliding. Types of anti-democratic discourse: Anti-democratic discourse in Germany is limited, characterized chiefly by intolerant discourse and generally confined to the political extremes. In general, the most widespread form of anti-democratic discourse in the German public sphere is intolerant speech in the form of attacks on minority rights. The frequency and prominence of anti-refugee rhetoric in 2017 was sufficient to lead Freedom House to downgrade Germany in its rating of Germany’s performance on its indicator of whether ‘laws, policies, and practices guarantee equal treatment of various segments of the population.’ It attributed this rating to the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam rhetoric from the nationalist and xenophobic group Pegida, founded in 2014 (Freedom House, 2018). In addition to extremist organizations such as Pegida, intolerant discourse has more recently been adopted by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which entered the Bundestag in 2017. The AfD has taken a strong anti-immigrant position. We characterize its rhetoric as intolerant not due to its opposition to immigration as such, but rather by the rhetorical strategies that it employs, such as language that characterizes foreigners as criminal or deviant. For example, a March 2018 parliamentary paper circulated by the AfD parliamentary party group requested information from Merkel’s coalition government on disability by age, whether they had migrated to Germany and ‘especially those resulting from [incestual] marriage within the family.’ Critics, including the German Ethics Council, noted that the AfD parliamentary paper attacked minorities (including the disabled) through the subtext of the question: suggesting a causal linkage between disability and incest and also connecting disability to migration. Other forms of ADD, such as attacks on democratic rules and institutions and attacks on pluralism, are rare. Pegida’s rhetoric comes closest to this. The group’s populist rhetoric extends beyond characterizing elites as corrupt; instead, it can be characterized as anti-system and anti-plural speech. Rallies in recent years have featured calls for the jailing of politicians (‘arrest Merkel’), intimidation or demonization of the media, as well as general calls, in a 2016 rally that led to hate crime charges against

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 47 the speaker, for the crowd to take up arms against elites, targeting the law courts, parliaments, journalists, and clergy (Druxes and Simpson, 2016). There are some incidences of attacks on the media. While Germany generally has high levels of trust in the media (Reuters 2018), there is an emerging discourse around the ‘lying press’ or ‘Lugenpresse,’ mostly deployed by Pegida. The European Journalism Observatory reports that the AfD have adopted a strategy of attacking the media and especially public broadcasters, although the party has tended to refrain from using the historically loaded term of ‘Lugenpresse’ (it was used by the national Socialists), choosing instead to speak of press bias or ‘fake news’ (Neudert, 2017; Udris, 2018). The same cannot be said of the party’s supporters: there are reports of chants of ‘Lugenpresse’ at AfD rallies (Irish Times, 2018; BBC, 2020). Severity, sources, and temporal patterns Overall in Germany, anti-democratic discourse is severe yet limited in its extent, contained largely at the political extremes, and focused mostly on intolerant discourse. So far, it has not led to contagion effects among parties on the right. While the Bavarian CSU has sought to limit migration, at the same time it has not adopted the rhetoric of the AfD. Instead, Bavarian CSU premier Markus Söder has attacked the AfD as being ‘unBavarian’ (DW, 2018a). Not surprisingly, extremist groups such as Pegida represent some of the most severe instances of anti-democratic discourse. Pegida’s rallies have provoked violence: the 2016 rally led to 226 arrests of Neo-Nazis engaged in violence (Druxes and Simpson, 2016). Anti-democratic discourse by parties in the German parliament is a relatively recent development. The AfD deployed intolerant discourse in an effort to mobilize anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2017 federal election campaign. In 2013, when the AfD first contested Bundestag elections, just missing the 5% threshold for seats, its manifesto and web page focused on the Eurozone and Greek debt crisis (Arzheimer, 2015). In contrast, migration was a minor issue that received relatively little attention. Anti-democratic discourse comes from opposition forces, including social movements, some media, and opposition parties. CONTEXTUAL CONDITIONS OF ADD IN GERMANY:

Germany’s historical experience of democratic breakdown and its efforts to move past this legacy have led to a legal and normative context which does not provide fertile ground for far-right parties or populism (Art, 2011). The emergence of the AfD in the 2017 federal parliamentary election, in which it won 12.6% of the vote and secured 94 seats, represents party system change in Germany where we not only see a breakthrough challenge from the right to the ruling Christian Democrats, but also increasing party system volatility and the emergence of populist strategies of competition. There is disagreement about the characterization of the AfD as a populist party.

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48  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson The AfD arose as a party focused on a critique of eurozone policy. It also voiced a strong anti-establishment message, mostly directed against the EU. Based on analyses of its 2014 EP manifesto and discourse, Arzheimer (2015) argues that it is neither populist nor far right, while Berbuir, Lewandowsky and Siri (2015) regard it as a ‘functional equivalent of a right wing populist party in a country where right wing politics are strongly stigmatized’ (2015, p. 154). The party has since shifted its focus toward a critique of immigration, yet discourse analysis has found the extent to which they deploy populist rhetorical strategies (such as invocation of the people against the corrupt elite) to be limited (Kim, 2017). An external threat figures prominently in intolerant anti-democratic discourse in Germany. Much of the anti-democratic rhetoric from AfD is aimed at migrants. This discourse was sparked by a large recent increase in migrants arriving in the EU, and in Germany in particular. In absolute numbers, Germany had the highest numbers of asylum applications of all EU states during the migration crisis. Its applications increased by 50% to peak at 745,155 in 2016, before falling to 222,560 the following year, once an agreement with Turkey was in place, stemming flows of migrants along the Western Balkans route (European Commission, 2018). One of the striking features of the German case is the strong protections of democratic institutions and practices built into its constitution, a reaction to its experience of democratic breakdown. Article 18 of the Basic Law provides for the forfeiture of basic rights (freedom of expression, press, teaching, expression, association, privacy, property, or asylum) when they are used ‘to combat the free democratic basic order.’ Article 21(2) bans parties that “by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.” In addition, the law on parties in Germany requires that political parties adopt a democratic internal structure. This, together with the requirement of Article 21(2), essentially prohibits undemocratic parties. Germany also has strict laws criminalizing speech. Article 5 of the German constitution provides for freedom of speech, but it also provides for its limitation when speech threatens the right to human dignity, through defamation or insult of an identified group, or when it is used in incitement to hatred or violence against minority groups. The German Courts have also interpreted speech protections in such a way as to limit the legal expression of deceptive speech, such as in the case of holocaust denial. In the Auschwitz Lie Case of April 1994, the Court ruled that ‘incorrect information is not an interest that merits protection. The Federal Constitutional Court has consistently ruled, therefore, that protection of freedom of expression does not encompass a factual assertion that the utterer knows is, or that has been proven to be, untrue’ (cited in Brugger, 2003, p. 13). Restrictions on freedom of speech have limited anti-democratic discourse of both the extreme left and the right. In August 2017, the online platform Linksunten Indymedia

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 49 was banned due to its publication of violent leftwing extremist material (Freedom House, 2018), and hate crime charges have been brought against speakers at Pegida rallies. The NetzDG law, which came into force in January 2018, further develops hate speech legislation. It requires social media companies to remove illegal content quickly or face fines of up to 50 million euros. In January 2018, Twitter suspended the account of senior AfD politician Beatrix von Storch in response to a post containing inflammatory language about Muslim immigrants. The law has been criticized for leading to over-cautious censorship by social media providers seeking to avoid fines. In this way, Germany’s new laws that restrict online hate speech may limit the occurrence of anti-democratic discourse, but at a cost. Freedom House reduced Germany’s rating on its indicator of free speech for 2017, in part due to the new laws restricting online hate speech (Freedom House, 2018).3 Germany’s strong democratic institutions and norms, as well as the strength of its civil society, have been important factors in the way in which actors have countered anti-democratic speech. For example, anti-democratic discourse from the AfD (in the form of an April 2018 parliamentary question that linked disability to incest and migrant groups) was met with a strong rebuke from parliamentarians, the governing party, other opposition parties and civil society, including churches and the German Ethics Council (DW, 2018b). These rebukes were framed in terms of the AfD having violated boundaries of acceptable speech, in both a moral and legal sense. This example highlights the important role that a healthy civil society plays in containing undemocratic discourse.

Conclusions The examples of Germany and Hungary have allowed us to identify some of the contextual conditions that either foster or limit anti-democratic discourse, and highlight the implications of anti-democratic discourse for democratic backsliding. Intolerant discourse was the most pervasive form of ADD that we saw, and among the first form of ADD to appear and spread. Anti-system ADD is less common, and in Germany, confined to the extra-parliamentary extremes. The prevalence of intolerant discourse warrants some elaboration of the concept. It should caution us from thinking about the various components of anti-democratic discourse as items on a multi-dimensional scale and instead encourage us to think of the forms of ADD as distinctive types, possibly with different drivers and mechanisms. As scholars of the radical right have theorized, intolerant discourse has a number of demand and supply side drivers, and is often linked to policy responses to threats. The more widespread use of hostile intolerant discourse vs. anti-establishment discourse by populist parties is consistent with the findings of scholars like Rydgren (2017) and Lugosi (2018), who argue that nationalism is the most defining feature of radical right populism.

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50  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson The cases of Germany and Hungary conform to these expectations. For anti-system or anti-plural discourse, however, it is not clear whether these same drivers apply. Anti-system or anti-plural rhetoric may be less useful as devices for eliciting electoral support or perhaps useful only when other conditions are favorable (such as contexts of extremely high polarization). Intolerant discourse in Germany and Hungary has typically occurred in a context in which actors have mobilized fears of an external threat, such as the spectre of uncontrolled migration, crime, or threats to a national identity or way of life. Such threats were closely tied to intolerant discourse directed at ‘out groups’ but not necessarily related to other forms of ADD. Increased inward migration by asylum seekers, peaking in 2015, has served as the basis for this threat mobilization. The actual facts of the migration have mattered much less than the framing: while the magnitude of the migrant flows entering Hungary was significantly lower than those in Germany, the expression of anti-migrant sentiment was a stronger discourse in Hungary than in Germany. In Germany, the strongest expressions of anti-foreigner sentiment have occurred in the Eastern Lander, where there have been fewer migrants compared to western Lander. In Hungary, a polarized party system has allowed populism to thrive. Germany, meanwhile, while generally a hostile environment for populism, has experienced party system disruption, in which traditional parties have lost votes to a new populist challenger party, the AfD, which uses populist rhetoric effectively. Questions remain on the drivers of the rarer forms of anti-democratic discourse (anti-system and anti-plural discourse), as well as their relationship to intolerant discourse. Does intolerant speech serve as a ‘gateway’ form of anti-democratic discourse, leading the way to other forms, or should we regard anti-plural and anti-system speech as rare variants of anti-democratic discourse, facilitated by different circumstances? The cases highlight the role of the strength of democratic institutions in the emergence of anti-democratic discourse. In Germany, strong liberal constitutionalism and institutional defenses against democratic backsliding have held anti-democratic discourse in check, particularly within the parliamentary realm. These strong institutions are a legacy of Germany’s history. Its constitutional limitations on free speech are borne of an interest in preventing hate speech and hate crimes; its robust defenses of democracy are a response to democratic breakdown. There is evidence that these laws have constrained the ADD of parliamentarians. First, anti-democratic discourse has triggered legal sanctions in Germany. Second, these laws, and the strong norms that underpin them, may be limiting anti-democratic discourse by shaping self-censoring behavior (such as the AfD’s careful avoidance of the term ‘Lugenpresse’). In Hungary, where democratic constitutionalism and democratic norms are weaker, institutional safeguards did not prevent the emergence of anti-democratic discourse. One of the most striking contrasts to emerge from the cases was the source of anti-democratic discourse. This, in turn, affects its impact. The  most

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 51 concerning is ADD that originates from the governing party or from within the political system, as we find in Hungary. The consequences of this are more severe because the speakers are in a position to act on the rhetoric. In Hungary, ADD from Fidesz has coincided with democratic backsliding through constitutional reforms, and the introduction of policies to ‘fix’ the problems the party has spoken of. In Germany, where ADD originates from anti-system forces, anti-democratic speech is more easily contained by institutional checks as well as democratic norms. Anti-democratic discourse originated from the political extremes and later emerged from a new populist right opposition party during a period of party system change. While we have seen a creeping spread of intolerant discourse from the extra-parliamentary extremist actors, it has spread into parliamentary party discourse as AfD adopted intolerant language to promote anti-immigrant policies. As we develop a better understanding of the conditions under which anti-democratic discourse appears, an important question that remains is its impact on democracy. Constant exposure to intolerant, anti-plural, or any other form of anti-democratic discourse can slowly erode our democratic values by normalizing undemocratic ones, desensitizing us, and making us less likely to object to antidemocratic behavior. The process of how anti-democratic language shapes anti-democratic practice is an important question at the heart of the study of democratic backsliding that warrants careful further empirical work.

Notes 1. In contrast to Germany, Hungary’s asylum claims peaked in 2015 at 177,135, steadily declining in 2016 (29,430) and 2017 (3,390) (European Commission, 2018). 2. For an overview of the Hungarian Government’s ’Stop Sörös Bill, see http:// www.kormany.hu/en/ministry-of-interior/news/government-puts-forwardstop-soros-legislative-package 3. Indicator D4 from the Freedom In the World report is ‘Are individuals free to express their personal views on political or other sensitive topics without fear of surveillance or retribution?’ (Freedom House, 2018).

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54  Lugosi-Schimpf and Thorlakson Lijphart, A. (1984). Democracies: Patterns of majoritarian and consensus government in twenty-one countries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lugosi, N.V.T. (2018). Radical right framing of social policy in Hungary: between nationalism and populism. Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, 34(3), 210−233. Lynch, M. (2012). In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Maisel, L.S. (2012). ‘The Negative Consequences of Uncivil Political Discourse’ PS: Political Science and Politics. July, 405−411. Massaro, T.M. and Stryker, R. (2012). Freedom of speech, liberal democracy and emerging evidence on civility and effective democratic engagement. Arizona Law Review, 54, 375−441. Minkenberg, M. (2013). The European radical right and xenophobia in West and East: Trends, patterns and challenges. In R. Melzer and S. Serafin, eds. Rightwing extremism in Europe: Country analyses, counter-strategies and labormarket oriented exit strategies. Berlin, Germany: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 9−33. Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and opposition, 39(4), 542−563. Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Mudde, C. and C. Rovira Kaltwasser, eds. (2012). Populism in Europe and the Americas: threat or corrective for democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mutz, D. C. and Reeves, B. (2005). The new video malaise: effects of televised incivility on political trust. American Political Science Review, 99, 1−15. Mutz, D. C. (2007). Effects of ‘in your face’ television discourse on perceptions of a legitimate opposition. American Political Science Review, 101, 621−635. Mutz, D.C. (2015). In-your-face politics: the consequences of uncivil media. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Neocleous, M. (2008). Critique of security. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Neudert, L. (2017). ‘Computation Propaganda in Germany: A Cautionary Tale’ Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Howard, Eds. Working Paper No. 2017.7, Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda. [online]. Available at: Comprop.oii. ox.ac.ukhttp://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/ 31 pp. Orbán, V. (2014). Speech at the 25th Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp. The Hungarian Government. [online]. Available at: http://www.kormany. hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-ministerviktororban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-andstudent-camp (Accessed: 22 September 2018). Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy online: Civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. New Media and Society, 6, 259−283. Pappas, T. S. (2014). Populist democracies: Post-authoritarian Greece and post-communist Hungary. Government and Opposition, 49 (1), 1−23. Pirro, A.L.P. (2014). Digging into the breeding ground: Insights into the electoral performance of populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe. East European Politics, 30(2), 246−270. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Hungary & Germany anti-democratic discourse 55 Pytlas, B. (2016). Radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe: Mainstream party competition and electoral fortune. London: Routledge. Reinfeldt, S. (2000). Nicht-wir und Die-da: Studien zum rechten Populismus (Vol. 8). Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller Universitäts. Reuters. (2018). Overview and Key Findings of the 2018 Report, Digital News Report. [online]. Available at: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/ overview-key-findings-2018/ (Accessed: 1 January, 2019). Rydgren J. (2005). Movements of exclusion: Radical right-wing populism in the western world. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers. Rydgren, J. (2017). Radical right-wing parties in Europe: What’s populism got to do with it?. Journal of Language and Politics, 16(4), 485−496. Sobieraj, S. and Berry, J. (2011). From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio and cable news. Political Communication, 28(1), 19−41. Strachan, J.C. and Wolf, M. (2012). Political Civility: Introduction to Political Civility. PS: Political Science and Politics, 45(3), 401−404. Stryker, R., Conway, B.A. and Danielson, J. T. (2016). What is political incivility? Communication Monographs, 83(4), 535−556. Than, K. (2018). Hungary submits anti-immigration ‘Stop Soros’ bill to parliament, Reuters [online]. Available at: https://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/ idCAKCN1FY1JE-OCATP. (Accessed: 10 August 2018). Turp, C. (2018). ‘Viktor Orbán can now do whatever he likes’. Emerging Europe [online]. Available at: https://emerging-europe.com/from-the-editor/viktororban-can-now-whatever-likes/ (Accessed August 10 2018). Udris, L. (2018). ‘Germany’s AfD: With the Media And Against The Media’ European Journalism Observatory. https://en.ejo.ch/media-politics/with-themedia-and-against-the-media Wodak, R. (2015) The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. London: Sage. Wolf, M., Strachan, J. and Shea, D. (2012). Forget the Good of the Game: Political Incivility and Lack of Compromise as a Second Layer of Party Polarization. American Behavioral Scientist, 56(12), 1677−1695. Zaller, J.R. (1992). The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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3

Measuring incivility in parliamentary debates: validating a sentiment analysis procedure with calls to order in the Austrian Parliament Marcelo Jenny, Martin Haselmayer and Daniel Kapla

Introduction The study of negative rhetorical interaction in parliament forms part of what Soroka (2014) termed the study of “negativity in politics.” Its most prominent subfield is negative campaigning (e.g. Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1995; Lau and Brown Rovner, 2009; Nai and Walter, 2015; Haselmayer, 2019; Haselmayer and Jenny 2018; Haselmayer, Hirsch and Jenny 2020), but also includes forms of incivility (Stryker et al. 2016) in the media (Jamieson, 1992; Mutz and Reeves, 2005; Mutz 2007), on the internet (Anderson et al 2014) or in parliamentary debates (Brooks and Geer, 2007; Herbst, 2010; Dodd and Schraufnagel, 2013). A recent addition is the use of rhetorical outrage by political actors (Sobieraj and Berry, 2011; Berry and Sobieraj, 2013). Studying incivility in parliamentary debates provides a distinct perspective on the phenomenon of political polarization. The dominant way of approaching the topic of political polarization has been through a (left-right) spatial representation in which an increase in polarization is understood as political actors, such as parties, moving apart on a dimension of conflict (Dalton, 2008), or when there is a multitude of actors, such as legislators from two parties, sorting into antagonistic camps on political issues with the middle ground less and less populated by legislators from both sides (e.g. Sinclair, 2006; Binder et al, 2009; Abramowitz, 2010; Mason 2015). Political polarization, as used in this chapter, is based on how political actors behave in deeds and words towards each other in the parliamentary or in other arenas (e.g. Uslaner, 1993;; Jamieson et al, 2018). Iyengar et al, 2012 Rhetorical incivility, the use of ‘strongly negative language’ that disrespects social or legal norms of civility is one means through which political actors indicate that they disagree with or disapprove of each other. Iyengar et al. (2018) called that “affective polarization.” While patterns of rhetorical interaction between MPs and parties in different legislative terms and under varying government compositions are of interest to students of parliamentary politics and party competition, the chapter’s focus is on making a methodological contribution. We use sentiment analysis (Liu, 2015), the systematic study of valence contained in textual data, to establish a measure for a statement’s level of incivility.

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Debate incivility: analysis in Austrian Parliament 57 We use manually annotated negative sentences taken from political texts, such as parliamentary debates, to train a supervised classifier, and validate the method’s capabilities of identifying rhetorical incivility in Austrian parliamentary debates by predicting actual Calls to Orders.

Calls to Order in the Austrian national council Parliamentary debates are highly regulated rhetorical exchanges between MPs or between ministers and MPs. The National Council, which is the dominant lower chamber of the Austrian parliament, to whom government is responsible. Its Standing Orders provide an elaborate set of rules regulating the debates, which are further specified by precedent decisions by the president of parliament (Czerny and Fischer, 1982; Atzwanger and Zögernitz, 1999; Gibba, 2013; Jenny and Müller forthcoming). At the start of a new parliamentary term, the National Council elects a president and two deputy presidents. The president has traditionally been a long-serving MP from the largest parliamentary party and the deputy presidents from the second and third largest party (Jenny and Müller, 1995). These three presiding officers direct the parliamentary debates, uphold compliance with the Standing Orders, and sanction MPs who fail to do so by violating decency or the dignity of the National Council through ‘insulting statements’ or behavior that ‘does not comply with orders of the President’ with a Call to Order (§ 102, Standing order of the National Council). Calls to Order that sanction uncivil rhetorical behavior provide an excellent resource to establish the validity of a sentiment analysis procedure.

Method and data Data We collected Calls to Order in the National Council issued over the course of five parliamentary terms (1996-2013). During that period, two types of majority coalition governments were in office. First there was a SPÖ-ÖVP coalition (1996-1999), then came two terms of an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition (20002006), followed by a return to SPÖ-ÖVP coalition governments in the last two (2006-2013) terms studied. Table 3.1 provides a count of Calls to Order issued based on a keyword query for Calls to Order (“Ordnungsrufe”) on the Parliament’s website. In these five parliamentary terms, the National Council held 756 plenary sessions in which the presiding officers issued 410 Calls to Order. On average, every second plenary session saw a MP sanctioned by a Call to Order. Two terms stand out with extraordinary high counts of Calls to Order, the 21st and the 24th term. In the 21st term an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition government – the so called ‘black-blue’ coalition – came into office for the first time. The highly controversial government formation initiated a period of left-right

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58  Jenny, Haselmayer and Kapla Table 3.1  Calls to Order in the National Council (lower house) Legislative term

Calls to Order

Plenary sessions

Calls to Order per plenary session

20. (1996-1999) 21. (1999-2002) 22. (2002-2006) 23. (2006-2008) 24. (2008-2013) 20.-24th term

68 85 69 25 163 410

182 117 163 75 219 756

0.4 0.7 0.4 0.3 0.7 0.5

Source: calculated from a keyword search (“Calls to Order”) at parliament’s website (www. parlament.gv.at)

polarization in parliament (Müller and Fallend, 2004). The 24th term, with a SPÖ-ÖVP government coalition in office, saw five parliamentary parties, a record number of MPs expelled from or exiting their party group and a new parliamentary party established by renegade MPs, and temperamental outbursts by MPs sanctioned with Calls to Orders. A Call to Order does not always follow immediately after a MP committed a transgression. Sometimes a MP or a parliamentary party lodges a protest to the president after the session and demands the sanctioning of an uncivil interruption by another MP. The president of the National Council then issues a decision on the matter in a subsequent plenary session. We extracted parliamentary debate contributions from the National Council’s debate transcripts, but without statements of presiding officers that referred to a past debate. For that reason our dataset of Calls to Order covers only 83% of the total number of Calls to Order issued. Table 3.2 shows the number of speeches and Calls to Order that were issued directly in a debate per term and the share of speeches sanctioned with a Call to Order. Overall, 1% of the speeches was sanctioned, with Table 3.2  Debate speeches and Calls to Order in the National Council Legislative term 20. (1996-1999) 21. (1999-2002) 22. (2002-2006) 23. (2006-2008) 24. (2008-2013) 20.-24th term

Speeches given in debates 7,272 5,085 7,159 2,953 10,143 32,612

Calls to Order in debates

Calls to Order in per cent of speeches

51 67 58 23 141 340

0.70 1.32 0.81 0.78 1.39 1.04

Source: own dataset of Calls to Order extracted from parliamentary debates

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Debate incivility: analysis in Austrian Parliament 59 higher rates of sanctioning in the first term of the black-blue coalition government and the last term of the period studied. We set up a case-control study that starts from the assumption that Calls to Order are issued to sanction strongly negative language, in line with the rules of order outlined above1. We use the texts of the speeches associated with a Call to Order and an identical number of randomly selected unsanctioned speeches to test whether sentiment analysis (Haselmayer and Jenny, 2017; Rudkowsky et al, 2018) can identify these uncivil – that is highly negative – parliamentary speeches. Method Our approach for identifying uncivil speeches starts with measuring the level of negativity of sentence-wise statements. It builds on a combination of negativity scores for words and sentences computing word embeddings scores for a sentence first and then running it through a neural network classifier to establish a negative sentiment score. The basics of the approach were presented in Rudkowsky et al (2018). We have improved it here by drawing on a bigger database of word embeddings and a different procedure for the sentiment classification. Sentiment scores of sentences in a speech derive from words contained in it. Word embeddings capture their relationship with other words that do not have to appear in a speech or text. Words with similar meaning and valence tend to appear in similar contexts: they are `embedded’ similarly. This contextual information was utilized in Rudkowsky et al (2018) through the Word2Vec program (Mikolov et al, 2013a; 2013b). Here, we use a set of German word embeddings provided by the multilingual NLP library Polyglot2 (Al-Rfou et al, 2013). Polyglot calculates individual word embedding features from a corpus of Wikipedia articles in the respective language. We computed the average of the word vectors to get values for a sentence vector as input for a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network that classified the strength of negative sentiment for the complete sentence. FastText3 (Bojanowski et al, 2016, Grave et al, 2018, Joulin et al, 2016; Mikolov et al, 2018) is an alternative library with a larger set of items (words and subwords).4 Using subwords, word components, the fastText library, with help from the Gensim library5, can establish meaningful word vectors even for words that are not found in the corpus. As another improvement to the procedure previously used (Rudkowsky et al, 2018) the procedure now respects word order. A sentence consists of a set of words in a distinct order, which are represented as a sequence of embeddedness word vectors. That preserves information on word order and captures dependences between words. To deal with a sequential data input, a Recurrent Neural Network processes the sequence of vectors and creates a single vector summary that is passed on to a three-layered Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) performing the actual classification of a sentence as neutral, negative, or very negative.67

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60  Jenny, Haselmayer and Kapla Text preprocessing is minimal: all stopwords and punctuations are kept. To compare results the new procedure was trained with the dataset used in Rudkowsky et al (2018). The training dataset consists of 20,580 sentences with a continuous negativity score per sentence ranging from 0 (“neutral”) to 4 (“very negative”) (Haselmayer and Jenny, 2017). These continuous scores were matched to one of three output classes (“neutral”, “negative”, “very negative”)8. The new model was trained 60 times with a dropout of 40% over the entire network. The average accuracy of was 63%, outperforming the procedure presented in Rudkowsky et al (2018) by 5%. There we reported an overall accuracy of 58% for a word embeddings approach compared to 55% accuracy for a ‘classic’ bag-of-words approach. To show that high negativity scores correspond with uncivil parliamentary behavior, we build a balanced case-control sample dataset with 680 speeches selected from parliamentary debates. Half of the speeches were sanctioned by a Call to Order, the other half constitute a random sample of unsanctioned speeches. All speeches have sentiment scores assigned by the procedure described above. Following similar research, we calculate speech sentiment scores by aggregating the mean value of all sentences in a speech (Haselmayer and Jenny, 2017; Rudkowsky et al, 2018). These scores constitute the input variable and issuance of Call to Order the output variable for a logistic regression. The goal is to establish the degree of correspondence between a high degree of negativity (or incivility) expressed in a parliamentary speech and the issuance of a Call to Order. We posit that the better the negative sentiment scoring procedure works in practice in scoring the degree of negativity contained in a speech the better should be the predicted sorting in sanctioned and unsanctioned speeches. Evaluating the procedure as proposed rests on a set of assumptions: a a Call to Order sanctions uncivil language, b uncivil language is very negative language, c issuance of a Call to Order is rule-based, but modified over time by new precedent decisions to the president’s rulebook, and d variation in presiding officers’ sanctioning of uncivil language is small. We have already presented evidence in support of the first two assumptions. The remaining assumptions may be more controversial. Some variation in how the three presidents of the National Council conduct debates and some leeway in dealing with transgressions has to be expected. The first president of the National Council enjoys more of it as the highest parliamentary authority than the other two presidents. The first president also directs more often the most controversial agenda items of a plenary session day. For a number of reasons a president’s leeway in sanctioning uncivil language and behavior in plenary sessions is bounded. Experienced MPs and parliamentary staff members know what typically warrants a Call to

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Debate incivility: analysis in Austrian Parliament 61 Order. Lists of previously sanctioned terms and behavior have been published in answers to parliamentary questions. Parliamentary sessions are open to the public, broadcast on the internet, and session transcripts available online. Party competition leads MPs to lodge a protest to the president whenever a transgression by an MP from another party is not immediately sanctioned. That is one side of the matter. However, because Members of Parliament know where the boundary between the acceptable and the unacceptable has been drawn in the past, there is also continuous innovation in how to rhetorically bash and insult opponents and, perhaps, get away with it. That includes using synonyms of items on the list of forbidden terms or the coining new offensive phrases. Variation in sanctioning behavior by presiding officers, innovative ways of expressing incivility by MPs, and parliamentary rulebook updating via precedent decisions, means that we cannot expect a perfect prediction of Calls to Order issuance from the degree of rhetorical incivility in a parliamentary speech measured. In spite of these challenges, the next section shows the sentiment analysis performs reasonably well in predicting sanctioned uncivil statements.

Results The aim is to predict ex post speeches from debates in the National Council sanctioned with a Call to Order. The degree of rhetorical incivility is the strength of negative sentiment in a speech based on the scoring method outlined above. We did a binary regression of Calls to Order issued on the negativity of a statement for our sample of 680 speeches, 50% of which were sanctioned, the other 50% were not. Table 3.3 shows the confusion matrix from the logistic regression model of predicted Calls to Order compared with their actual issuance. The logistic regression model performs slightly better in correctly classifying statements that did not result in a Call to Order than the set of sanctioned statements. The positive predictive value is 73.6% (for statements sanctioned with a Call to Order), the negative predictive value is 77.2%. Highly negative statements – based on the sentiment scoring – that were Table 3.3  Confusion matrix of logistic regression model of Calls to Order on statement negativity True values Model predictions Call to Order predicted Not predicted Column totals

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Call to Order issued

No Call to Order issued

Row totals

268 72 340

96 244 340

364 316 680

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62  Jenny, Haselmayer and Kapla not sanctioned constitute interesting cases of variation in the sanctioning behavior of presiding officers. The logistic regression model has a correct prediction rate of 75.3% and improves on the 69.7% of the earlier version presented in Rudkowsky et al (2018). That is considerably better than random guessing. For a dataset with balanced event classes random guessing produces on average a correct prediction rate of 50%. Comparing the results to state-of-the-art sentiment analysis applications is difficult, due to the human decision-making component involved in the issuance of Calls to Order. We see predicting a Call to Order as a harder task than a dichotomous classification of positive and negative texts. Such tasks obtained accuracy scores of about 85% in recent English language applications (e.g. Jianqiang et al, 2018). Levels of accuracy for more complex classification tasks, such as hate speech detection in German language texts, are similar to our study (Ross et al, 2017; Bai et al, 2018).

Conclusion The study of incivility in parliament provides an interesting perspective on party competition and negativity in politics. Valid and reliable measurement of incivility, however, remains a challenge. We have described a procedure to get a graded measure of incivility and applied it to parliamentary speeches, particularly ones that were sanctioned by a Call to Order. Sanctioned speeches should be located in the upper range of a negativity scale and thus constitute valuable data to do validity tests for sentiment analyses procedures. Our sentiment analysis procedure combines the crowdcoding of a sample set of statements with a word embeddings approach and a neural network classifier to arrive at a graded measure of negativity. We produced negative sentiment scores for 680 parliamentary speeches in the Austrian National Council, the lower house of the national parliament. Half of them were sanctioned by Calls to Order, the other half were not. This balanced set of statements constitutes a case control design with negativity scores as input variable and Call to Order issuance as outcome variable in a logistic regression model. If measurement of negative sentiment strength works, a logistic regression should be able to separate sanctioned from unsanctioned statements. Overall, the presiding officers’ actions were correctly predicted in three out of four cases. The validation exercise performed reasonably well, and the graded measure of negativity obtained by the procedure presented should be useful for analyzing ups and downs of incivility in parliamentary debates over time. The empirical analysis was on debates in German, but the sentiment analysis procedure can be easily applied to other languages. A strong point of the word embeddings approach is the availability of multi-lingual libraries. Providing a valid and reliable measurement of incivility in parliamentary

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Debate incivility: analysis in Austrian Parliament 63 debates can improve our understanding of negativity in democratic politics in general and its contribution to affective polarization in contemporary societies in particular (Iyengar et al, 2018).

Notes









1. The president’s answer to a parliamentary question on the issuing of Calls to Order in the 24th legislative period contains a precise list of reasons along with exact keywords. Based on 108 Calls to Order, the vast majority (92%) were due to rhetorical negativity, such as personal insults or denigration.https://www. parlament.gv.at/PAKT/VHG/XXIV/ABPR/ABPR_00065/fnameorig_239591. html 2. https://polyglot.readthedocs.io 3. https://fasttext.cc/. The vocabulary of Polyglot’s German language library consists of the 100.000 most frequent words in the corpus. The length of individual feature vectors of word embeddings is 64 dimensions, the length of the feature vector in fastText is 300 dimensions. 4. It includes approximately two million items for the German language. Subwords can be used to obtain information for unknown compound words. As compounds are common in the German language, and particularly relevant in the context of political speeches, it improves word coverage substantially. 5. https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/ 6. The GRU units’ dimension is 128 and uses a Rectified Linear Unit Activation function. The MLP transforms the output vector in three layers (with dimensions of 128, 128 and 64 using a Rectified Linear Unit Activation function). The final output layer (with a Softmax activation function) produces a single score per sentence from a three-valued negative sentiment scale. 7. We tested a range of structurally more complex model options, including‚ larger models with more layers and/or vectors with higher dimensions but classification performance did not improve further. 8. Class assignment of sentences in the dataset was performed by splitting the score interval into equal subintervals: sentences with a score in the interval [0.4 to 3] were considered ‘neutral’, in the range [4/3 - 8/3] ‘negative’ and larger values were classified as ‘very negative’.

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Debate incivility: analysis in Austrian Parliament 65 Jamieson, K.H., Volinsky, A., Weitz I. and Kenski, K. (2018). The political uses and abuses of civility and incivility. In Kenski, K. and Jamieson, K.H. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication. Oxford Handbooks Online. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.79_update_001 Jenny, M. and Müller, W.C. (1995). Presidents of Parliament: Neutral Chairmen or Assets of the Majority in Döring, H. (ed.), Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe. Frankfurt/New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 326−364. Jenny, M. and Müller, W.C. (forthcoming). ‘The Politics of Legislative Debates in Austria’ in Around the World, ed. Debus, M., Bäck, H. and Fernandes, J.M. (eds.). The Politics of Legislative Debates around the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jianqiang, Z., Xiaolin, G. and Xuejun, Z. (2018). Deep convolution neural networks for Twitter sentiment analysis. IEEE Access, 6, 23253−23260. Joulin, A., Grave, E., Bojanowski, P. and Mikolov, T. (2016). Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification. CoRR abs/1607.01759. https://dblp.org/rec/bib/ journals/corr/JoulinGBM16. Lau, R.R. and Brown Rovner, I. (2009). Negative Campaigning. Annual Review of Political Science, 12(1), 285−306. Mason, L. (2015). “I disrespectfully agree”: The differential effects of partisan sorting on social and issue polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59(1), 128−145. Mikolov, T., Chen K., Corrado, K. and Dean, J. (2013a). Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space. CoRR abs/1301.3781. https://dblp.org/rec/ bib/journals/corr/abs-1301-3781 Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado G. and Dea, J. (2013b). Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality. CoRR abs/1310.4546. https://dblp.org/rec/bib/journals/corr/MikolovSCCD13. Mikolov, T., Grave, E., Bojanowski, Puhrsc, C. and Joulin, A. (2018). Advances in Pre-Training Distributed Word Representations. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). Müller, W.C. and Fallend, F. (2004). ‘Changing Patterns of Party Competition in Austria: From Multipolar to Bipolar System. West European Politics, 27(5), 801−835. Mutz, D.C. (2007). Effects of “in-your-face” television discourse on perceptions of a legitimate opposition. American Political Science Review, 101(4), 621−635. Mutz, D.C. and Reeves, B. (2005). The new videomalaise: Effects of televised incivility on political trust. American Political Science Review, 99(1), 1−15. Nai, A. and Walter, A.S. (2015). New perspectives on negative campaigning: Why attack politics matters. Colchester: ECPR Press. Al-Rfou, R., Perozzi, B., and Skiena, S. (2013). Polyglot: Distributed word representations for multilingual NLP. In Association for Computational Linguistics (ed.), Proceedings of the Seventeenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. Sofia, pp. 183−192. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W13-3520. Ross, B., Rist, R., Carbonell, G., Cabrera, B., Kurowsky, N. and Wojatzki, M. (2017). Measuring the Reliability of Hate Speech Annotations: The Case of the European Refugee Crisis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.08118. Rudkowsky, E., Haselmayer, M., Wastian, M., Jenny, M., Emrich, S. and Sedlmair, M. (2018). More than Bags of Words: Sentiment Analysis with Word Embeddings. Communication Methods and Measures 12(2-3), 140−157.

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66  Jenny, Haselmayer and Kapla Sinclair, B. (2006). Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sobieraj, S. and Berry, J.M. (2011). From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news. Political Communication, 28(1), 19−41. Soroka, S.N. (2014). Negativity in Democratic Politics: Causes and Consequences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stryker, R., Conway, B.A. and Danielson, J.Z. (2016). What is political incivility? Communication Monographs, 83(4), 535−556. Uslaner, E.M. (1993). The Decline of Comity in Congress. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Part 2

Political incivility in the parliamentary arena

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4

Legislative conflict: are ideologues more uncivil? Scot Schraufnagel, Nicholas Casas, Thomas Bacharz, Nathan Holm and Claire Miller

Introduction The concept of incivility in political discourse is difficult to nail down and scholars wrestle with whether changes in incivility are elite or mass driven? Is it the case that more uncivil political leaders cause the public to grow more jaded? Or, does a more polarized electorate simply choose representatives that reflect their animus? Some imagine the mass media plays an important role in coloring political discourse. Or, perhaps the often-acerbic rhetoric of election campaigns fuels incivility in other aspects of political dialogue? In all, the debate over incivility in politics is a broad one with wide-ranging implications for governance in modern societies. The questions are many and the answers are few. In keeping with the traditional approach political science has taken to answering complex questions this chapter addresses only one small section of a very large, and often unyielding, political puzzle. Specifically, the chapter wrestles with incivility in political discourse as it is manifest in the United States national legislature. Historically, the US Congress has been home to many colorful anecdotes involving fisticuffs, ill-tempered shouting matches, and name-calling. The contemporary period has witnessed its own rancor and off-colored personality battles. These occurrences, which we refer to as incivility, are often attributed to party polarization or the growing distinct policy preferences of partisan actors (Loomis, 2000; Sinclair, 2000). Yet, it seems that this explanation may be incomplete. Clearly, it is possible to disagree with another, strenuous, while maintaining civility in the manner in which we interact with our opponent. Likewise, it is not difficult to conceive people with similar policy preferences, for reasons of personality, have a difficult time getting along with one another. If either of these two occurrences exists than difference over policy is distinct from what we are labeling incivility. Jim Wright (D-TX), the speaker of the House of Representatives at the end of the 1980s, seemed to grasp the distinction between polarized policy positions and personality conflict or incivility. In 1989, he acknowledges

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70  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller that personal attacks are occurring with regularity and that this is a troubling development: ‘When vilification becomes an accepted form of political debate…and harsh personal attacks upon one another’s character drown out the quiet logic of serious debate, surely that is unworthy of our institution… All of us…must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end! There has been enough of it.’[n.p.] Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX), May 31, 1989. From the quote we learn that incivility in political discourse in the US national legislature has been occurring throughout the modern era. Indeed, it is pretty easy to imagine that things have gotten worse since the late 1980s. Yet, scholars who study conflict in the US legislature are prone to only pay attention to partisan disagreement over policy, or more generally, party system polarization measured by roll call voting. We are suggesting that these works are potentially missing something important about the totality of conflict in legislatures. This is important to consider because incivility in legislative discourse may have unique effects on a competent parliamentary process, beyond what is captured by differences in the voting behavior of the members of major political parties. Theoretically, some amount of partisan policy disagreement and debate would seem essential to healthy governance in a democracy. Moreover, in a political system where members of the legislature are elected to represent distinct constituencies it should be the case that they will disagree often. Yet, it is likely not as important for members to disrespect the views of their policy opponents. Nor, are personal animosities and spiteful rhetoric necessarily conducive to quality debate. Indeed, a willingness to cooperate on a personal level with partisan opponents might even be desirable and facilitate effective law-making. Larry Dodd (1981) argued, some time ago now, that long-established norms of civility are what allow members of Congress to engage in spirited and meaningful debate while remaining within the boundaries of courtesy and respect for their colleagues’ perspectives. He noted, these discussions provide the best setting for the development of high-quality legislation. On the other hand, when courtesy norms are violated, sustained incivility can lead to a break-down in policymaking (Dodd and Schraufnagel, 2006) and public trust in governing institutions (Cook and Gronke, 2005). It is quite easy to imagine the two types of conflict reinforcing one another within a legislative institution. Members who disagree on policy may become so heated in their disagreement they will take to shouting insults at one another. Or, prior personal animosities might cause members to disagree on policy proposals for purely vindictive reasons. However, if partisan opponents ever get along, socially or personally, while maintaining their distinct policy preferences, then, it must be the case that the two forms

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Legislative conflict: are ideologues uncivil? 71 of conflict can diverge from one another. Likewise, if there are people who hold very similar political views who cannot seem to get along and dislike each other on a personal level, then, the two forms of conflict must be different. At the heart of this research is an attempt to answer the question ‘are people who are more prone to disagree on public policy, also, more uncivil?’ Put differently, are the individuals who are responsible for high levels of party polarization in the US legislature the same members most prone to act in an uncivil manner toward their workplace colleagues? In answering this question, we will test the conventional wisdom that members who are more extreme in their issue positions, or more predisposed to policy disagreement, are the same individuals who refuse to embrace courteous norms. In the testing we will treat the US Congress as a decision-making body, subject to the same types of workplace conflict that students of organizational behavior have found exist in private-sector settings (Pondy, 1967). The first type of conflict the organizational scholars identify is often referred to as ‘task conflict,’ and involves differences in opinions or viewpoints about how to best solve problems and/or promote an organization’s mission (Shaw, Zhu, Duffy and Scott, 2011). Task conflict, we hold, is analogous to the general partisan policy differences in legislatures often captured by summing up each political party’s roll call behavior and differencing the values. This aggregate difference is then commonly used by congressional scholars as a measure of party system polarization. The second type of organizational conflict is commonly referred to as ‘relational conflict,’ and can be understood as workplace tension, annoyance or personal incompatibility over values, habits or personalities (De Dreu, 2008, p. 6; see also Jehn, 1995, pp. 257-58). Relationship conflict is similar to the conflicts captured by the study of uncivil behavior by members of Congress, which often results in the hurling of insults, name calling, and even physical altercations. For example, in 2015, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) of being a ‘liar’ on the Senate floor and repeated the affront multiple times in a raucous and mean fashion.1 This display of incivility or ‘relational conflict’ clearly would not be picked up by traditional measures of partisan conflict given that both senators represent the same political party. There has been a well-documented increase in policy gridlock in the US Congress in modern times (Binder, 1999; 2017; Mayhew, 1991), while others find diminishing public support for Congress (Hibbing and Thiess-Morse, 1995; Cooper, 1999). Still others are concerned about the legislature’s unremitting submission to presidential authority (Jones, 1994; Cooper, 2017). Our norm-centered perspective suggests that much of the trends congressional scholars are uncovering may be attributable to an increase in incivility in political discourse, which has occurred over the past 30 years (Uslaner, 1993; Schraufnagel, 2005; Dodd and Schraufnagel, 2012; Schraufnagel and Dodd, 2016). Some argue this recent pattern is a reflection of contemporary social tensions (Uslaner, 1993; 2000) and a reaction to the practice in

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72  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller the early years of the ‘Textbook Congress’ of stifling congressional conflict (Burns, 1963). Dodd and Schraufnagel (2006) suggest that increased incivility threatens to cripple the long-term functioning of Congress and that the study of congressional incivility will allow scholars to understand the unique state of politics in the contemporary United States.

Testing whether ideologues are more uncivil We use the term ideologue to refer to someone who is more extreme in their policy preferences. These individuals may be extreme relative to the chamber’s median preference or their own party’s median preference. Importantly, these are two distinct concerns. For instance, a Democrat may vote often with Republican Party leaders, which means their voting behavior would be near the chamber median and we might label them as moderate. This same member, however, might be considered an ideologue by the members of her or his own political party because they often vote against the preferred policy position of their own party leaders. On the other hand, an ideologue may vote with their political party more consistently than other members of the party, making them more ‘extreme’ in their policy preferences as it relates to the chamber median. On a unidimensional ideological line this person would find themselves on one or the other extreme, further on average from both the chamber and party median. Hence, we hold there are two types of ideologues that we need to consider. One who distances themselves from the party median and the other who distances themselves from the chamber median. In the testing, which follows we wish to learn if either member is more or less prone to act in an uncivil manner toward their workplace colleagues? In order to accomplish this test, we need to begin by identifying uncivil members of Congress. Once established, we can then compare their voting behavior to the voting behavior of members who are more civil.

Moving forward with the testing To find uncivil norm-breaking members of Congress we search coverage of the US Congress in the New York Times and Washington Post, two of the country’s leading newspapers, from 1877 to 2014 using an explicit set of search terms. Once identified, these individuals are randomly matched to another member from their same Congress, from their same political party, and their same legislative chamber. Randomized selection of control group members is facilitated by the use of a random number generator and when this process picks a member who was implicated as uncivil, or was already in the control group, their number was put back, and the process was repeated until a suitable control group member was identified. In our search of over 100 years of congressional history we turn up 394 members of Congress who have been implicated as being raucous, spiteful, disrespectful, and/or

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Legislative conflict: are ideologues uncivil? 73 prone to violent outbursts. Each is matched up with someone who was never mentioned in the newspapers as acting in the manner described. Considering the two groups there is a sample size of 788 members of Congress to use in the testing that follows. In the analysis, DW-NOMINATE scores, based on the recorded roll call behavior of members are used to indicate each member’s relative policy preference or ideological predisposition (Poole and Rosenthal, 1984). These scores make use of multidimensional scaling to extract similarities in the voting behavior of members of a legislature. The votes are assumed to reflect each member’s policy preference in relation to all other members’ preferences and it is common for scholars to assume each member’s score is a reflection of their ideology. To be certain very high and very low scores clearly indicate that a member is voting differently or more distinctly from others, suggesting they may be an ideologue or someone extreme in their policy preferences. In our analysis the average policy preferences of implicated individuals and the average preferences of their matched pair are compared to chamber and party median scores. In the event a member was implicated as behaving in an uncivil manner multiple times the DW-NOMINATE scores of the implicated member, their matched pair, the chamber median, and the party median scores are drawn from the Congress when the uncivil member was first mentioned in the newspaper reports. At issue is whether members implicated in uncivil acts are more extreme in their voting behavior, on average, than their matched pairs. If this is the case, we must conclude that extreme policy preferences and incivility are closely linked. If the uncivil members are no more likely to be extreme in their voting behavior, then the two types of conflict we have been discussing must be, on average, distinct.

More on identifying uncivil members As noted, newspaper reports are used to find legislators implicated in uncivil acts. In particular, the following two searches were conducted. The initial search uses the terms ‘Congress,’ ‘House of Representatives’ and ‘Senate’ in the full text with any of the following terms: ‘rancor,’ ‘comity,’ ‘civility,’ ‘incivility,’ ‘courteous,’ ‘courtesy,’ ‘discourteous,’ ‘discourtesy,’ ‘trust and anger,’ ‘discord,’ and ‘collegiality;’ also, in the full text. A second search specifies that ‘Congress,’ ‘House’ or ‘Senate’ has to appear in the title and that any of the following terms needs to be in the full text: ‘personalities,’ ‘grudge,’ ‘raucous,’ ‘insolence,’ ‘contempt,’ ‘amity,’ ‘lack of good will,’ ‘impertinence,’ ‘brash,’ ‘audacious,’ ‘hot-headed,’ ‘heated,’ ‘disrespect,’ ‘lack of respect,’ and ‘discordant.’ The combined search nets over 61,000 articles from the two newspapers during the time period studied (1877-2014). Many articles are dismissed as not relevant by reading the headline or the first few sentences.2 Others were read much more carefully to determine if there was an incivility perpetrated

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74  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller by a member of Congress being discussed. The articles we use mention specific instances of norm breaking incivilities, or personal conflict between members when these conflicts resulted in public displays of sarcasm, obvious disrespect of another member, the hurling of insults, name calling, and physical altercations. We use only articles that call attention to these behaviors when the legislators are acting in their official capacity, in Washington DC, as a member of the contemporaneous Congress. We do not consider incivilities in election campaigns or articles on incivility which occurred in a previous Congress. Ultimately, the process nets 877 New York Times articles that discuss 912 incidents of incivility. Most articles discuss only a single incident, but 31 Times articles discuss two incidents, and two articles discuss three different personal attacks or belligerent acts. Considering the Washington Post there were 887 articles that mentioned 910 incidents, 864 articles mention a single incident, and 23 articles mention two separate acts of incivility.3 With the articles in hand, the names of the members who were implicated in the uncivil acts are pulled and a database is created. When two members are shouting back and forth both individuals are included. When a single individual is responsible for the aggression the recipient of their wrath, if there is one, is not included. The number of times a member is implicated is also chronicled. ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Tillman the Democratic senator from South Carolina was mentioned 32 times and tops the list of the most ‘uncivil’ members. Honorable mention goes to Joseph McCarthy (R-WI; 30 mentions), George Hoar (R-MA; 18 mentions), Huey Long (D-LA; 18 mentions), and Roscoe Conkling (R-NY; 14 mentions). In all, the process nets five females and 389 males. Table 4.1 provides a breakdown of the implicated individuals by political party and legislative chamber. One hundred and six of the members are Democrats serving in the House of Representatives and 107 are Democrats serving in the Senate. Eighty-eight implicated individuals are House Republicans and 93 are Senate Republicans. In the investigation that follows we focus on these 394 individuals and their matched pair. A matched Table 4.1  Chamber and partisan tags 1877-2014: individuals implicated in norm breaking incivilities House of Representative Democrat

Republican

n = 111 n = 88 chamber total = 194

Senate Democrat

Republican

n = 107 n = 93 chamber total = 200

Note: Each of the implicated members is randomly matched with another member of Congress from their same chamber, same party, and their same Congress creating an overall sample size of 788 in the testing that follows ((194 representatives + 200 senators) * 2). Source: Compiled by the authors.

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Legislative conflict: are ideologues uncivil? 75 pair analysis capitalizes on the advantages of a ‘most similar case design,’ which is often used in case study research. Because each implicated individual is matched with another member from their same Congress, political party, and legislative chamber these three considerations are held constant and cannot be explanations for the different outcomes: uncivil or civil.

Moving forward with the testing To test whether members of Congress implicated in personal animosities or norm-breaking incivilities are the same individuals who contribute to party system polarization we record the DW-NOMINATE scores of the uncivil members in our new database along with the DW-NOMINATE score of their matched pair. Then, using values for the same Congress, we record the chamber and party median DW-NOMINATE scores, respectively. In the database, the chamber and party median scores are repeated in every row represented by an implicated individual and their matched pair from the relevant Congress. By calculating the average distance between members of the two groups (i.e. experimental and control group) from the chamber and party medians we can learn whether the uncivil members are, on average, more extreme in their voting behavior than their matched pairs. Importantly, because DW-NOMINATE scores are computed, independently, by chamber for each Congress, the comparison to chamber and partisan medians is conducted separately for members of the House and the Senate. Table 4.2 displays the results of the comparison based on chamber median scores. Notice straightaway there is no statistically significant difference in the voting behavior of the two groups. Moreover, because implicated members are scored ‘1,’ and their matched pair scored ‘0,’ we would expect the bivariate correlation analysis to produce positive coefficients if the uncivil Table 4.2  Bivariate correlations: average ideological distance of individuals implicated in norm breaking incivilities versus their matched pair, using the Chamber median DW-NOMINATE score as the baseline Implicated Members are scored “1” and the Matched Pair is scored “0” Overall r = -.021; p < .56 n = 788 House of Representatives

Senate

Democrat

Republican

Democrat

Republican

r = -.007; p < .92 n = 212

r = -.015; p < .84 n = 176

r = -.019; p < .78 n = 214

r = -.052; p < .48 n =186

Source: Compiled by the authors.

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76  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller Table 4.3  Bivariate correlations: average ideological distance of individuals implicated in norm breaking incivilities versus their matched pair, using the party median DW-NOMINATE score as the baseline Implicated Members are scored “1” and the Matched Pair is scored “0” Overall r = .042; p < .25 n = 788 House of Representatives

Senate

Democrat

Republican

Democrat

Republican

r = -.023; p < .74 n = 212

r = -.012; p < .88 n = 176

r = .094; p < .18 n = 214

r = .094; p < .21 n = 186

Source: Compiled by the authors.

members were, on average, more extreme in their voting behavior. Instead in each of the five tests (one overall and four representing a breakdown analyses by chamber and political party) the bivariate relationship is negative indicating that the average difference from the chamber median is actually lower for the group of uncivil members than the average distance for the matched pair group. Table 4.3 reports the results of a comparison of the two group’s average distance from the party median score. Note the ‘overall’ coefficient value is positive suggesting that the average difference is greater for the implicated individuals than it is for those who were never implicated in an uncivil act in the newspaper reports. Yet, the difference does not reach standard acceptable limits used to define statistical significance (p < .05). Note also, this positive coefficient is the result of Senate values. The bivariate correlation coefficient values representing members from the two groups who served in the House of Representatives are again negative. In the Senate, we have uncovered the first bit of evidence, albeit statistically insignificant, that uncivil members may be ideologues. Importantly, it is not the case that they are more extreme relative to the chamber, but only in a comparison to their party median or their party brethren’s preferred policy positions. In order to better appreciate the results reported in Tables 4.2 and 4.3, we create Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2. The first Figure depicts results for the House of Representatives. Implicated members, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, are located on the ideological line closer to both the chamber median and the partisan median, consistent with our findings. The negative bivariate correlation coefficients for the House, found in Tables 4.2 and 4.3., suggest there is less distance between the group of implicated members in the House than their matched pairs when considering either the chamber or the party median. It is important to

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Legislative conflict: are ideologues uncivil? 77

Figure 4.1  A  n approximated display of the ideological distance between implicated individuals and their matched pair.

remember that the difference between these two groups is not statistically significant and consequently the figure places the two groups close together on the line. It is also the case that the distance between both groups and their party median is quite small. Nevertheless, it is the case that House members, implicated in uncivil acts, are closer to the ‘average’ member in the House measured two different ways. Figure 4.2 presents a depiction of the Senate results obtained from Tables 2 and 3. Again, there is no specific difference between the two major political parties. Tests of Democrats and Republicans produce comparable results. In the Senate, implicated individuals, from both political parties, are closer to the chamber median than their matched pair, on average. But, the positive bivariate correlations shown in Table 4.3 indicate that, on average, these same individuals are further away from their party median score than the matched pairs. The figure depicts the approximated position of the implicated members sandwiched between the chamber median and their matched pairs. In other words, in the Senate, the average ideological difference between implicated members and the chamber median is smaller.

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78  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller

Figure 4.2   A n Approximated Display of the Ideological Distance between Implicated Individuals and their Matched Pair.

But the average distance for implicated Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, is greater when considering the party median score.

Multivariate tests Bivariate relationships can be misleading and in a worst-case scenario spurious. It maybe there is an antecedent condition that once controlled for will change the statistical relationship in these tests which seek to find if uncivil members contribute positively to party system polarization. In the multivariate tests which follow the uncivil members are, again, scored ‘1’ and their matched pair is scored ‘0.’ These 1’s and 0’s become our dependent variable and accordingly we will use a logistical regression analysis. To test whether uncivil members are more extreme in their voting behavior, we create four distinct models, each seeking to predict who the uncivil members are. Our measure of ideological distance will figure prominently in these tests. The Ideological Distance scores have already been calculated and used in the bivariate tests. They measure each member’s (both uncivil members

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Legislative conflict: are ideologues uncivil? 79 and their match pair) distance from either their party or chamber median score. These indicators of ideological distance become our key explanatory variables. If ideologues are more uncivil, the distance measure will associate positively with whether a member is labeled uncivil, or not, and we will obtain statistically significant positive coefficients in the regression model runs. Because we have values from two chambers and are considering two types of ideological distance, we identify four possible models: 1) difference from House chamber median, 2) difference from Senate chamber median, 3) difference from House party median, and 4) difference from the Senate party median. To ensure we have a robust test of whether ideological distance predicts incivility we include several rival explanations for why someone might be implicated in uncivil acts in the newspaper reports. First, we imagine that considerable experience as a State Legislator might make one less likely to act in an uncivil manner toward workplace colleagues. These individuals might be more familiar with the give and take of legislative processes. Michael Berkman (1993) finds that state law makers, on average, make better national legislators. Berkman uses five years as a state legislator as his determination of ‘experience’ and we follow his lead. It can be noted, 51 of the 394 (12.9%) implicated members (the test group) have five or more years of state legislative experience and this compares to 67 out of the 394 members from the randomly chosen control group (17.0%). We also test the level of education of the members from each group to learn whether uncivil members, on average, might be less educated. Specifically, a dummy variable is created scored ‘1’ if members, from either group, had no college education or only a bachelor’s degree from an in-state university that did not make the list of the 50 most prestigious universities in the country as determined by US News.4 The variable is named In-State or Limited Education. Other members, who have advanced degrees, went to college out-of-state, or went to ‘prestigious’ in-state universities, are scored ‘0.’ The expectation is that the test will return a positive coefficient or that those with a limited education will be more likely to have been implicated in uncivil acts while serving in Congress. Next, we control for whether the members of Congress were ever a Standing Committee Chair. Because the time period studied envelops the entire era characterized by committee government (Owens, 1997) when committee chairs were the gatekeepers of the legislative agenda. We can  imagine that this group, with more power and prestige, might have been especially scrutinized by newspaper reporters. A statistically significant positive coefficient would suggest that the subset of legislators who served as standing committee chairs were either more uncivil, on average, or that their behavior was simply more carefully dissected by journalists. In any event, the random sampling of matched pairs finds only 24% (96 out of the 394) of the control group members served as a standing committee chair as compared to 36% of the implicated members (140 out of the 394).

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80  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller Fourth, we test whether Age makes a difference. In this instance, age is calculated in days from each member’s birthdate to the date the implicated individual first appears as uncivil in a newspaper report. The number of days is divided by 365.25 to determine age in years. The expectation is that older members will be more likely to be implicated in uncivil acts. The theory is simply that older, longer serving members, are more likely to get aggravated by the legislative process. The frustration might be with new members or with a process that does not live up to their expectations based on experiences from earlier in their legislative careers.5 Fifth, we test whether serving in one of the states of the former Confederacy associates with a greater probability of being implicated in an uncivil act. From one perspective, the South in the US is defined by an aristocratic political culture, which represents gentility, courtesy, kindliness, and ease, which was embodied in heroes like George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. Many analysts, however, have rejected what W.J. Cash calls this ‘gone-with-the-windery,’ instead emphasizing within the region’s historical political culture the manifestations of popular religion, the ill-mannered nature and inhumanity of much of Southern politics, and the relationship between violence and honor in Southern culture (Cash 1941, pp. 20-21). We enter Served in the South as a dummy variable with a value of ‘1’ for members who served in any of the 11 states of the former Confederacy and hypothesize the test will return a positive coefficient or that these members will be more likely to be uncivil.6 Last, working backwards, or inductively, it was noticed that members who had served an Interrupted Term seemed to be overrepresented in the group implicated as uncivil. One might imagine that having served for a time, losing an election, and then to find one’s way back to Congress might create a proverbial ‘chip on the shoulder,’ in a manner that might lead to the breaking of civility or courteous norms. Empirically, it can be noted that 81 of the 394 uncivil members (21%) served an interrupted term and that only 58 (15%) of the control group served an intermittent term. It is important to point out that our intention has not been to develop the definitive model that can explain uncivil member behavior. Rather the Logit regressions are intended to provide a more robust test of our bivariate findings, which suggest uncivil members are, on average, not more likely to be ideologues or extreme in their roll call behavior. If this is the case than incivility and party system polarization are distinct forms of conflict in the US legislature. Table 4.4 displays the results of model runs, for both chambers, using the chamber median as the testing ground. Note straightaway, that in neither chamber is it the case that the difference between member DW-NOMINATE scores and the chamber median score can predict uncivil behavior. Indeed, in the Senate model the test produces a negative coefficient suggesting that if anything the implicated members are a shorter distance from the chamber median than their matched pair. The association, however, cannot

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Legislative conflict: are ideologues uncivil? 81 Table 4.4  Testing for an association between norm breaking incivilities and ideological extremism: A consideration of the chamber median Logit Regression: Implicated Members scored “1” and the Matched Pair scored “0” House of Rep.

Senate

Expected Sign

Coef. (s.e.)

Coef. (s.e.)

Ideological Distance (Chamber Median)

(+)

.29 (.42)

-.38 (.47)

State Legislator (5+ years’ experience) In-State or Limited Education Standing Committee Chair Age (in years) Served in the South Interrupted Term

(-)

-.58 (.28) *

-.20 (.32)

(+) (+) (+) (+) (+)

-.06 (.22) .65 (.30) * .04 (.01) * .06 (.24) .29 (.30)

.19 (.21) .33 (.22) .02 (.01) * .48 (.24) * .42 (.26)

-2.02 (.64) * 23.74 * .04 388

-1.70 (.61) * 18.12 * .03 400

Variable Name

Constant Chi2 Pseudo-R2 n *p < .05 (one-tailed test) Source: Compiled by the authors.

rightfully be distinguished from zero. We do note, that state legislative experience makes one less likely to be implicated in an uncivil act in the House model and that in the Senate model members who have served in one of the states of the former Confederacy are more likely to have been implicated as uncivil. Age is statistically significant and positive in both models, suggesting older members are more prone to raucous behaviors. Table 4.5 displays the results of a parallel analysis using the party medians as a baseline. The first evidence that uncivil members are more distinct in their voting behavior is uncovered in the Senate. Controlling for other considerations the implicated group of senators are a statistically significantly greater distance from the party median than their matched pairs. But we learn it is not the case that uncivil senators are ideologues defined as someone who is on the far right or left side of the ideological spectrum. Rather these senators are closer to the chamber median score than their matched pair, but statistically significantly farther away from the party median. Figure 2, above, displays the character of this association. Specifically, what this finding suggests is that uncivil senators tend to be more moderate, on average, sandwiched between the chamber median score and the matched pair group. So, they may be different in their voting behavior, relative to their co-partisans, but more toward the middle. In other words, the one statistically significant finding we obtain regarding the association between incivility and ideological voting behavior runs counter to

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82  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller Table 4.5  Testing for an association between norm breaking incivilities and ideological extremism: a consideration of the party median Logit Regression: Implicated Members scored “1” and the Matched Pair scored “0” House of Rep.

Senate

Expected Sign

Coef. (s.e.)

Coef. (s.e.)

Ideological Distance (Party Median)

(+)

-.16 (.89)

1.55 (.81) *

State Legislator (5+ years’ experience) In-State or Limited Education Standing Committee Chair Age (in years) Served in the South Interrupted Term

(-)

-.57 (.28) *

-.18 (.32)

(+) (+) (+) (+) (+)

-.07 (.22) .58 (.29) * .04 (.01) * .08 (.24) .28 (.30)

.21 (.21) .43 (.21) * .02 (.01) * .41 (.24) * .42 (.26)

-1.89 (.64) * 23.28 * .04 388

-1.96 (.62) * 21.21 * .04 400

Variable Name

Constant Chi2 Pseudo-R2 n * p < .05 (one-tailed test) Source: Compiled by the authors.

the polarization thesis. Our uncivil members in the Senate are more likely, on average, to vote with the other party attenuating any indicator of polarization based on roll call behavior. We can convert the statistically significant logit coefficient representing Ideological Distance from the party median, in the Senate Model, to a predicted probability. Doing so we learn the probability of being implicated in an uncivil act grows .325 or over 32% as you move from the minimum to the maximum distance from the party median.7 In other words, as senators move away from their party median toward the chamber median there is a considerable increase in the likelihood they will be implicated as uncivil, all else being equal. In this new set of tests, Age is again statistically significant in both models, as is serving as a Standing Committee Chair. Moreover, being a State Legislator attenuates the likelihood of being implicated as uncivil in the House model and having served in the South associates with a greater probability of being implicated in the Senate model. Under the conditions describe in Endnote #7, the likelihood of a senator being implicated as uncivil grows from 42% to 53% if they served in one of the states of the former Confederacy. In the House model, the likelihood of being implicated if you served for five or more years in a state legislature goes down from 50% to 36% on average.

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Legislative conflict: are ideologues uncivil? 83

Discussion The suspicion has been that acting on personal animosities is not the same as disagreeing over policy. To test this thesis, uncivil members of the US Congress were identified and randomly matched with another member from their same Congress, political party, and chamber. We hold there is value in replicating this study using other national legislatures. It is not the case, as this volume attests, that increase in uncivil political discourse is limited to the United States. We hold our theory of two-dimensional conflict theoretically applies to all legislatures in democracies at both the national and subnational level. Distinguishing these types of conflict is done routinely by organizational scholars who seek to understand optimal business or organizational environments. We hold that legislatures should be treated like other workplaces and receive the same scrutiny. Again, our intention has been to test whether incivility and task or policy differences are one and the same. We use the US Congress as our testing ground. In anticipation of reasonable critiques, which would question whether mildly uncivil members are watering down our analysis or that data from the 19th Century mixed with data from the 21st Century might explain our null findings, we have supplied an Appendix, which is available from the authors and replicates the analysis appearing in Tables 2 and 3 under different circumstances. First, the analysis is conducted with only those members, and their matched pairs, who were implicated in the post-reform Congresses (Davidson, 1992) or in the post-Watergate era (1973-2014). Next, a parallel analysis is conducted using only members, and their matched pairs, who were implicated in newspaper reports a minimum of three times, which reduces our sample size but arguably gives us a better test of whether the real uncivil members are ideologues. The results of these auxiliary tests do not produce any statistically significant findings that would counter the findings reported in the text of the paper. In our review of the newspaper articles used to define the uncivil members we find that, frequently, the personality battles were between members of the same political party. These intra-party personal conflicts appear within both major political parties and during the entire time period studied. Importantly, these battles cannot, and do not, cause party system polarization because the members are from the same political faction. If one wished, we suppose it would be possible to construct an argument that party polarization frustrates members of the same party in such a manner that they act uncivil toward one another, but that seems like a stretch. In all likelihood intra-party incivility attenuates party differences. What we would like to suggest is that policy differences are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to produce uncivil behavior in legislatures or societies as a whole. If you like the causal arrow going the other direction, we would be equally adamant that uncivil behavior is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce polarized politics. The implications of

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84  Schraufnagel, Casas, Bacharz, Holm and Miller this for the study of politics are substantial. For instance, it has become common for researchers to model a whole host of legislative outcomes using ‘conflict’ or party polarization as a predictor variable. If incivility has explanatory power these models may be producing erroneous inferences. It would not matter if both incivility and polarization were high, low, or moving in different directions, if they are not the same thing, then omitted variable bias is producing faulty conclusions regarding the effect of conflict on the outcomes of interest. Most specifically, if incivility is a inimitable form of legislative conflict, then, unique indicators of aggregate incivility must be developed to place alongside party polarization in models that use ‘conflict’ as a predictor of outcomes in legislatures around the world.

Notes 1. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/ted-cruz-says-mitch-mcconnell-liesexport-import-bank-120583 (last accessed May 10, 2020). 2. Many of the easy to discard articles dealt with conflict in the African National Congress or the New York, New Jersey, and Virginia state legislatures. 3. To test inter-coder reliability, two graduate assistants recollected the newspaper articles from both papers, using the search detailed above. The total number of articles identified, Congress by Congress, correlates with the original values at .76 (p < .01). We also had two different students pull names from a subset of the articles and correlate this with the names pulled by the authors. The average correlation between the three lists of names is .79 (p < .01). The correlations suggest there are some reliability issues. We examine all differences carefully and ultimately change some data entries based on the new information. All articles used to create the data bases have been archived and are available for public scrutiny and for the purpose of replication. 4. The list can be found at https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/ national-universities (last accessed May 11, 2020). The most prestigious universities have certainly changed some during the time period of this study. However, many of the schools on the list, such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, have almost certainly been on the list for the entire time period of the study (1877-2014). There were some members with a degree from ‘prestigious’ foreign universities but these were always advanced degrees, so these individuals were already scored ‘0’ on the variable In-State or Limited Education. 5. We also calculate data on the Tenure of each member, in years. Unfortunately, this variable is highly correlated with Age (r = .56; p < .001) and Standing Committee Chair (r = .25; p