Correlates of Party,Ideology and Issue Based Extremity in an era of Egocentric Publics

Abstract

We extend the study of political extremity to an evolving media landscape. We differentiate between political and non-political uses of both “traditional” and “new” media, and situate political extremity within a new conceptualization of public– egocentric publics –a meso-level phenomenon enabled by new communication technologies that overcomes the traditional dichotomy of small groups and mass publics. Testing the relationship between information, expression, and extremity in Colombia, a sociopolitical context with high levels of polarization and distrust, we find that traditional media use is mostly unrelated to the tested forms of extremity: party-, ideology-, or issue-based. In turn, expressive Internet use is related to extremity and—contrary to what some commentators have feared—this relationship is negative. Lower extremity associated with online expression is consistent with the notion of egocentric publics advanced in this article. The results underscore the importance of differentiating between various media formats in political communication research, reveal the media correlates of various forms of extremity can take, and provide evidence that the emerging publics made possible by new media are not necessarily polarizing.