Mediated contestation in comparative perspective

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hartmut Wessler
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2014 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 260291564

Mediated contestation is an important arena for the articulation of identities and interests as well as a crucial context for democratic governance and problem solving. This project aims at identifying the relevant macro-social and media-related preconditions of mediated contestation as well as systematically assessing them from different normative perspectives.In the first project phase the extent, structure, content and style of mediated contestation over issues related to religion/secularism are analyzed across three media types (daily newspapers, news websites, and political blogs) and six democracies (USA, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and Lebanon). In the second phase this analysis is supplemented by a comparison of the more recent forms of user-generated mediated contestation in (a) user commentaries on online news websites, (b) commentaries on Facebook pages of news media and political groups, and (c) debates on the microblogging platform Twitter. In doing so, the project responds to the fact that mediated contestation nowadays involves journalists, political actors, and citizens alike.Beyond the explanatory factors studied in the first phase (the structure of the political system, the (non-)existence of a deep cultural division, opportunities for users to respond to media content, and the level of opinion orientation in media offerings) two additional factors are addressed in the second phase: (1) context collapse (the degree to which private and public messages are mingled on an online discussion platform) and (2) the primary use function (that is, whether a platform primarily serves as a forum for controversial discussion of contentious issues or as a meeting place for the likeminded). In its second phase, the project thus investigates how context collapse and primary use function of different online discussion platforms influence the extent, structure, content and style of mediated contestation about religion/secularism in the six countries studied. The main aim of the project lies in the development of a context- and culture-sensitive as well as media-specific theory of mediated contestation in all its currently significant forms.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants