CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Závecz, Gergő |
|---|---|
| Title | Elite Conflicts and Their Effects on Political Support as a Function of Elite and Mass Polarization |
| Summary | The main contribution of this dissertation is the exploration of how a certain type of disconnection between the political elite and citizens may impact support for the democratic political system. Specifically, this dissertation is concerned with how differences in elite and mass polarization mediate the effects of conflicts, verbal attacks and negativity among partisan elites on support for the political system. I find that it is not the frequently loathed conflict-rich talk of politicians in itself that raises negative feelings among the citizens about the political system and the actors. Rather, the effect occurs when differences in polarization between political elites and their followers are especially pronounced. Thus, the dissertation contributes to the political communication literature by identifying the condition under which negativity, disagreements and conflict-rich talk among politicians creates negative citizen attitudes towards how democracy works. The implication is that it is not the natural tendency of the democratic process to generate visible displays of elite conflict that makes citizens dislike democratic politics, but when it coincides with an apparent oversupply of ideological polarization among elites relative to how much citizens themselves get divided on an ideological basis. Chapter 2 uses three waves of European Election Study (EES) data to show that elite polarization increases how conflictual EU-related news are prior to a European Parliament (EP) election. Chapter 3 uses a dataset on university students in 24 countries prior to the 2014 EP election and finds that when citizens are more polarized, the same campaign debate is perceived as being less negative by them. Chapter 4 again uses EES data to examine the main empirical argument of the dissertation. It finds that in countries where elites are more polarized than the electorate, support for the political system is more strongly undermined by exposure to explicit conflicts between politicians than elsewhere. Finally, in Chapter 5, based on a survey of a representative sample of the online population in a country with a clear disconnect between elite and mass polarization on EU issues, I test whether conflictual rhetoric in such contexts in fact hurts popular support for democracy as the previous findings suggest. In general, the dissertation partly supports and partly complements the elite integration theory outlined by John Higley (most recently in 2010), namely that strong elite divisions bring uncertainty and decreasing support among citizens for the entire political system. The dissertation shows that when partisan elites are divided to a larger extent than their supporters in the electorate, even less harsh debates are seen by citizens as more conflictual, and this decreases political support. However, my results also show that when elites differ little from the masses in how politically polarized they are, or when masses are more polarized, citizens are less sensitive to expressions of elite debates, perceive less negativity in politics, and their support for regimes does not decrease significantly when exposed to signs of elite conflict. These results support that citizens react to elite behavior: when citizens have to listen to endless elite disagreements and conflict-rich talk on a particular issue in which they are more or less united, this bothers them, and they articulate their distaste in the form of decreasing political support for the system that produced these endless disagreements. |
| Supervisor | Tóka, Gábor |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/zavecz_gergo.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University