Disrespectful Democracy

The Psychology of Political Incivility

Emily Sydnor

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231548250
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The majority of Americans think that politics has an "incivility problem" and that this problem is only getting worse. Research demonstrates that negativity and rudeness in politics have been increasing for decades. But how does this tide of impolite-to-outrageous language affect our reactions to media coverage and our political behavior?

Disrespectful Democracy offers a new account of the relationship between incivility and political behavior based on a key individual predisposition—conflict orientation. Individuals experience conflict in different ways; some enjoy arguments while others are uncomfortable and avoid confrontation. Drawing on a range of original surveys and experiments, Emily Sydnor contends that the rise of incivility in political media has transformed political involvement. Citizens now need to be able to tolerate or even welcome incivility in the public sphere in order to participate in the democratic process. Yet individuals who are turned off by incivility are not brought back in by civil presentation of issues. Sydnor considers the challenges in evaluating incivility's normative benefits and harms to the political system: despite some detrimental aspects, certain levels of incivility in certain venues can promote political engagement, and confrontational behavior can be a vital tool in the citizen's democratic arsenal. A rigorous and empirically informed analysis of political rhetoric and behavior, Disrespectful Democracy also proposes strategies to engage citizens across the range of conflict orientations.

1

INTEGRATING THE POLITICAL AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL

THE TELEVISION SERIES The Bold Type tells the fictional story of three young adult women, Jane, Kat, and Sutton, navigating challenges in their professional and personal lives while working at a fashion magazine in New York City. In the third episode, Kat, the social-media director for the magazine, is trolled online for publishing an article about how virtual reality (VR) technology is more likely to make women experience motion sickness than men (Weyr 2017). As the nasty tweets, rape threats, and harassment escalate, the viewers watch Kat and her friends arrive at different strategies for handling the trolls.

JANE: Maybe you should stop looking.

KAT: Oh, jeez. Oh, yeah, I’m a slut because I took a topless photo of myself in the south of France. What is wrong with these people?

SUTTON: Okay, hey, look. It’s not all bad. The CEO of a VR company tweeted at you. Emily Ramos says “Sorry for what you’re going through. I support you and have your back.”

KAT: Oh, wow. Followed immediately by someone who thinks my boobs aren’t that great. [Starts typing a response] “He says as he takes a break from masturbating in his parents’ basement.”

JANE: Come on. Don’t engage.

KAT: I’m not engaging, Jane. I’m fixing this.

Kat’s fictional story reflects a contemporary reality: incivility is increasingly a part of our online experience. While incivility comprises a relatively small part of the total text in Internet comments sections (Coe, Kenski, and Rains 2014; Muddiman and Stroud 2016, 14), it has nonetheless become a creeping presence on social media. And it has become even more central to political discourse in the past few years as Americans elected a president who is particularly prolific on Twitter. The New York Times keeps a running list of the “People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter” since he declared his candidacy in 2015. The list started with 199 items; as of February 2019, it had grown to 567 entries, many of which had been insulted multiple times (Lee and Quealy 2019). As incivility becomes more prominent in online political discourse, those who are active on social media—whether for fun or as part of their job—must figure out how they are going to respond when things get nasty.

Kat’s experience is emblematic of that of many female journalists who regularly face online incivility and harassment as part of their job. In a series of interviews with women in journalism around the world, Gina Chen and her colleagues (2018) found that many journalists have specific strategies—blocking users, filtering out comments that include specific words—for combatting trolls; others shift how they cover the news, focusing on positive stories or showing multiple sides of issues to avoid abuse. The approach an individual journalist takes is to some extent dictated by the institutional norms and practices of her own media outlet, but it is also a matter of personal preference and comfort when faced with conflict.

Ultimately, Kat decides that the solution to handling the trolls is to engage with civil comments online, while simultaneously giving Emily Ramos, the VR CEO, the first shot at working with the magazine to develop VR fashion tools. Before she arrives at this decision, however, we see different reactions to targeted online incivility. Kat’s gut reaction is to respond to the trolls, matching their incivility and aggression with her own insults and outrage. Jane, on the other hand, encourages her “not to engage,” to step away from Twitter and, in doing so, protect herself from the barrage of hate.

Why do Jane and Kat have these divergent reactions to incivility? And what are the consequences? In this book, I explore how a personal predisposition—conflict orientation, or one’s innate reaction to conflict—shapes how the American public reacts to incivility. Political thinkers and democratic theorists worry that incivility threatens the survival of American democracy. Without mutual respect and tolerance, we are incapable of arriving at compromises in public policy or agreement about national identity and values (Mill [1859] 1989; Gutmann and Thompson 1996). Yet modern critiques of civility’s democratic role point to its power to silence dissent and maintain an unequal status quo (Chafe 1980; Zerilli 2014).

The ideal tone of discourse falls somewhere in the balance: a politics grounded in mutual recognition and respect, where incivility is only employed strategically to call attention to cases where that respect is absent. In the absence of this ideal, I argue that we must pay greater attention to individuals’ reactions to routine incivility—the incivility experienced when you turn on the television or open your social-media apps—while recognizing that those reactions will differ among people.

Individuals experience conflict in different ways. Some people enjoy arguments and are perfectly comfortable entering a shouting match in public; others are uncomfortable at the sight of an argument and avoid face-to-face confrontation. I expect that people on the polar ends of this spectrum of “conflict orientation” will have different emotional and behavioral reactions to contemporary in-your-face politics, regardless of their gender, partisan identity, or ideological commitments.

Kat, for instance, finds arguments exciting. She is quick to jump into the fray, whether to fight back on Twitter or argue with a man on the street when he insults her Muslim friend for wearing a headscarf. Jane, on the other hand, is naturally inclined to avoid conflict. She shies away from confrontation in most situations and worries about how to deal with conflicts with her boss, her boyfriend, or the subject of her latest news piece. It is no surprise, then, that when faced with uncivil comments, the two women have very different responses. You can sense Jane’s anxiety about engaging with the Twitter trolls, and her response—“don’t engage”—demonstrates her desire to step away from the conflict. Kat, on the other hand, is angry with her attackers, and one senses an underlying enthusiasm for the fight. These two women have a lot in common—age, occupation, education, political perspectives—yet their reactions to incivility lead them to very different behaviors. This book focuses on those reactions: the interaction between conflict orientation and incivility in political media. How does the presence or absence of incivility in television coverage of politics and in entertainment differentially affect us?

The media cover political issues ranging from economic deficits to immigration policy to appropriation of funds to Planned Parenthood as civil or uncivil, sometimes all within the same sixty-second television package. Those who are uncomfortable with conflict, whom I call “conflict-avoidant,” are anxious and disgusted in the face of incivility. But the “conflict-approaching” react with enthusiasm or amusement to the same coverage. Besides this store of positive feelings toward political coverage, the conflict-approaching will go on to participate in more political activities, particularly those in which they might face conflict and incivility themselves.

Incivility causes a set of Americans to engage in politics, but it can also alter the quality of that engagement. Incivility breeds incivility. As citizens see name-calling and vitriol as part and parcel of elite political communication, they are more likely to use it themselves. The conflict-approaching, however, are equipped with more armor in the battle for civil discourse. They react more positively toward incivility than their conflict-avoidant peers, but they are less likely to search it out in their media diet and no more or less likely to use it in their own political discussions. In the meantime, they are more engaged in political activities beyond voting—they protest, they call their representatives, and they attempt to persuade their peers. Just as time, money, and skills act as resources for citizen engagement in politics (Brady, Verba, and Schlozman 1995), so too does one’s psychological response to conflict.

Our reactions to incivility are, of course, not only a reflection of our orientation toward conflict. Incivility is strategically deployed by politicians, journalists, and citizens alike (Herbst 2010), and our response is contingent on our relationship to those using the language and our own preferences and identities. It should be no surprise, then, that our partisanship colors our identification of and reaction to incivility. When incivility comes from their own party or affiliated media (e.g., MSNBC for Democrats or Fox for Republicans), people are more likely to use incivility themselves, but they are also likely to depolarize, becoming more ambivalent about the two political parties. When incivility is used in attacks against their party, however, people are not only more likely to use incivility in their own responses, they are also more likely to react by moving to the extremes (Gervais 2015; Druckman et al. 2019).

To the dismay of some theorists and practitioners, democratic politics will never be exclusively civil. People will disagree, and they will disagree with strong emotions and in emotional language that reflects their identities and values. The goal of this book is to demonstrate that some—those who are more likely to approach conflict—continue to learn about and participate in politics even when it gets ugly. While there is constant tension between participatory and deliberative approaches to democracy, the conflict-approaching are better equipped to walk that tightrope. Meanwhile, the conflict-avoidant stand just outside the ring, discouraged and disillusioned by the toxicity of uncivil politics.

AMERICA’S “CIVILITY PROBLEM”

If the first step to overcoming a problem is to acknowledge you have one, American democracy should be well on its way to rehabilitation. Americans are not afraid to admit that they have a “civility problem”—that our political leaders and the mass public struggle to be polite or respectful to those with whom they disagree. Americans also prefer elected officials who stand their ground to those who choose compromise. In 2010, Lanny Davis, founder of the Civility Project and former White House counsel to President Clinton, commented that the level of vitriol was the worst he’d seen in his forty years in Washington (Karl and Simmons 2010). In a June 2017 PBS/NPR/Marist poll, 70 percent of respondents said they believe the overall tone and level of civility in Washington has gotten worse since Donald J. Trump was elected president (Taylor 2017). When pressed to allocate blame for increasing incivility, individuals point to both the politicians and the media (Weber Shandwick, KRC Research, and Powell Tate 2013).

Americans are quick to acknowledge that incivility is a nationwide problem, but most report that it has little effect on their own behavior. Public relations firm Weber Shandwick reports that Americans encounter some form of incivility about 10.6 times in an average week, or one to two times per day. Half of these experiences are offline, in “real life,” while the other half are online (Weber Shandwick, KRC Research, and Powell Tate 2018). While citizens acknowledge that incivility has become a daily part of their lives and are quick to point fingers at politicians and the media as the cause, only a quarter of respondents report that they have taken any action in response.

Incivility shapes Americans’ political behavior. But incivility does not affect everyone equally or in the same direction. Instead, its power depends on how an individual is predisposed to react to conflict—whether the person finds it exciting, uncomfortable, or so anxiety-inducing as to be avoided it at all costs. Psychological conflict orientation and political incivility shape our emotional reactions to media content and, ultimately, our decisions about political news consumption and engagement in political discussion and activities. From this perspective, the rise of incivility in political media—critical institutions that inform and motivate citizens—has transformed the nature of who gets involved by changing the resources needed to successfully engage with the style and structure of political discourse. Specifically, citizens must now regularly tolerate or even welcome incivility in the political sphere. Citizens with a conflict-approaching orientation, who enjoy conflict, can navigate political media and certain political activities in a way that their conflict-avoidant counterparts do not.

It has been well established that incivility, whether on television, in the comments section of a newspaper article, or over social media, has a range of good and ill effects on political behavior. Scholars have emphasized television’s unique visual perspective on politics, our tendency to react to what we see on screen as though we are experiencing it face to face, and the ease with which camera angles can be used to violate social norms for personal space (Mutz 2015; Reeves and Nass 1996). Each of these makes it easier for televised incivility to affect those watching—reducing their trust in government, their perceptions of its legitimacy, and their participation in it (Brooks and Geer 2007; Geer and Lau 2006; Kahn and Kenney 1999; Mutz and Reeves 2005).

The rise of the Internet made incivility’s presence even more explicit. The web offers a cloak of anonymity and limited constraints on citizens’ ability to express their opinions. These structural components of online discourse facilitate uncivil behavior to the point that scholars find conside...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Integrating the Political and the Psychological
• 2. The Political Psychology of Conflict Communication
• 3. To Laugh or Cry? Emotional Responses to Incivility
• 4. Choosing Outrage: Selective Exposure and Information Search
• 5. Mimicry and Temper Tantrums: Political Discussion and Engagement
• 6. A More Disrespectful Democracy?
• Appendix A: Additional Study Information
• Appendix B: Statistical Models and Results
• Notes
• References
• Index