Across various contexts, attacks on democratic institutions and pluralist ideals have intensified, and these attacks frequently revolve around identity. Divisive rhetoric targeting marginalized identity groups, including those defined by race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation, has become a central strategy in political debates, particularly among far-right leaders (Knüpfer et al., 2024; Kreiss & McGregor, 2024; Norris & Inglehart, 2019). As a result, the foundations of pluralistic democracy and the rights of the diverse identity groups that constitute it are increasingly at risk. Despite the seriousness of this moment, scholarship in political communication has historically failed to treat identity as a central theoretical and empirical dimension.
The field, however, continuously self-reflects and evolves. In recent years, political communication scholars have more explicitly acknowledged the role of group dynamics and social identities in shaping political communication and pressing global challenges, including democratic backsliding (Bennett & Kneuer, 2024; Coles et al., 2025; Lane et al., 2025; McGregor et al., 2025). These links are evident in the dynamics of affective polarization, a process that places groups in growing opposition while heightening in-group favoritism and intensifying out-group animosity (Hameleers, 2019). Such sustained targeting of out-groups deepens social divisions, reduces empathy and shapes attitudes in ways that diminish support for pro-outgroup policies and may even increase acceptance of human rights violations (David, 2023; Esses et al., 2013).
In this regard, centering identity in political communication scholarship better equips the field to understand contemporary political developments and also creates opportunities to de-westernize the field. Incorporating critical perspectives from non-Western contexts, including discursive traditions, understandings of power hierarchization and locally grounded analyses of group relations, can enrich political communication theories and broaden explanatory frameworks. Such incorporation also invites a diversification of methodological approaches. Political Communication has long been criticized for privileging quantitative methods (Gagrčin & Butkowski, 2023) and overlooking qualitative and interpretive traditions, yet these approaches are often essential for examining the complex and dynamic logic that identity cues operate.
Centering identity essentially enables more complex analytical approaches. Incorporating identity centrally allows us to understand how identity cues are embedded in messages, how they relate to the communicator and how they are interpreted by different groups. In this sense, placing identity at the core of our frameworks strengthens analyses at both the level of communication practices and the level of audience effects.
The Issue 32 of the Political Communication Report examines the emerging “Identity Turn” in political communication by exploring evolving theoretical paths and possible empirical implications. The six contributions gathered here demonstrate how integrating identity into political communication frameworks can reshape our understanding of political messages, media effects and offer new paths for democratic defense.
The issue opens with a contribution by Shannon and Coe (2025), who argue that political communication scholarship should adopt a clearer stance on the role of identity. They contend that scholars must identify, name and categorize identity more explicitly in their analyses. For them, democratic erosion is closely connected to divisive identity-based politics, and they call on the field to take a more explicit normative and analytical stand.
Building on this, the next contribution by Boyer (2025) proposes a new framework titled “Political Group Communication,” which offers a systematic approach for examining how different groups communicate about identity and politics. His contribution centers on the development of four archetypical communication patterns that can help guide analyses of group-based communication and its potential effects.
The contribution by Neumann (2025) expands the theoretical discussion by focusing on the dynamics of affective polarization. He demonstrates the importance of maintaining conceptual precision, adopting multi-level perspectives and including a broader range of actors in our analyses. His piece encourages scholars to pay attention not only to elite dynamics but also to reactionary and progressive groups.
Orchard and Santos (2025) offer a fresh perspective on the importance of incorporating identity-based information repertoires into political communication research. In an era of personalized content choices, their contribution invites scholars to consider how identity shapes news usage patterns, moving beyond traditional approaches that focus primarily on partisan alignment.
The issue then turns to an empirical perspective. Meltzer (2025) shows that the framing of groups and the way audiences respond to political messages depend on their intersectional identities. She illustrates that media effects are often conditional on audience predispositions and identity-based experiences, and that the same message may produce different interpretations depending on the recipients’ group affiliations.
To conclude the issue, Rovira-Sancho (2025) reflects on the methodological challenges of capturing identity and shows that non-traditional approaches, such as ethnography, can provide new pathways for political communication research, particularly for understanding how identity is lived, negotiated and performed within social movements.
I hope that this issue brings new ideas and venues of research for the scholars in our field. Happy reading!
References
Bennett, W. L., & Kneuer, M. (2024). Communication and democratic erosion: The rise of illiberal public spheres. European Journal of Communication, 39(2), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231231217378
Boyer, M. M. (2025). Political Group Communication: Social Groups as Active Communicators. Political Communication Report, Winter (2025)(32).
Coles, S. M., Kreiss, D., Lane, D. S., & McGregor, S. C. (2025). Toward a group theory of political communication. Journal of Communication, jqaf049. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf049
David, Y. (2023). The effects of exposure to gendered stereotypes on emotions toward immigrants and attitudes toward refugees. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 49(19), 4828–4849. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2064840
Esses, V. M., Medianu, S., & Lawson, A. S. (2013). Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees: Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees. Journal of Social Issues, 69(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12027
Gagrčin, E., & Butkowski, C. (2023). Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Qualitative Methods in Political Communication Research. Political Communication Report, 2023(27). https://doi.org/10.17169/refubium-39042
Hameleers, M. (2019). Putting Our Own People First: The Content and Effects of Online Right-wing Populist Discourse Surrounding the European Refugee Crisis. Mass Communication and Society, 22(6), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2019.1655768
Knüpfer, C., Jackson, S. J., & Kreiss, D. (2024). Political Communication Research is Unprepared for the Far Right. Political Communication, 41(6), 1009–1016. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2414268
Kreiss, D., & McGregor, S. C. (2024). A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms. New Media & Society, 26(1), 556–579. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231161880
Lane, D. S., Chen, M., & Wang, Y. (2025). An “Identity Turn” in political communication?: Testing the relationship between media use and identity alignment in the United States. Journal of Communication, jqaf026. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf026
McGregor, S. C., & Coe, K. (2025). The Centrality of Identity in Political Communication. Political Communication Report, Winter (2025)(32).
McGregor, S. C., Coe, K., Saldaña, M., Griffin, R. A., Chavez-Yenter, D., Huff, M., McDonald, A., Redd Smith, T., White, K. C., Valenzuela, S., & Riles, J. M. (2025). Dialogue on difference: Identity and political communication. Communication Monographs, 92(2), 217–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2025.2459648
Meltzer, C. E. (2025). Intersectional Identity and Differential Media Effects. Political Communication Report, Winter (2025)(32).
Neumann, R. (2025). The Role of Identity in Affective Polarization. Political Communication Report, Winter (2025)(32).
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595841
Orchard, X., & Santos, M. (2025). Information Repertoires in Algorithmic Platforms and Political Identities in Post-Partisan Scenarios. Political Communication Report, Winter (2025)(32).
Rovira Sancho, G. (2025). Becoming “Us”: The Performative Role of Identity in Feminist Political Communication in Mexico. Political Communication Report, Winter (2025)(32).
Author
Isabella Gonçalves is a postdoctoral researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her work focuses on political communication and journalism studies. Her research examines the structural and discursive factors that contribute to the formation and reinforcement of social divisions, with a particular emphasis on divisive and negative political discourse, the underrepresentation of marginalized groups in political communication and media, and journalism safety. Alongside her research, she serves as editor of the Political Communication Report and manages the websites and social media channels for the Political Communication divisions of APSA and ICA. She is also an active member of the DigiWorld network and the Digit
Political communication as a practice is fundamentally about identity, in all its myriad forms. But political communication as a subfield of Communication and Political Science has not always adequately recognized this. We made this argument earlier this year in a piece we published in Communication Monographs. Working with a tremendous team of coauthors and respondents, that “Dialogue on Difference: Identity and Political Communication” feature helped illuminate the many ways that political communication research could benefit from centering identity (McGregor et al., 2025).
In the present essay, we briefly summarize – but, more importantly, extend – our arguments in that piece. Even though that article appeared in 2025, work on it began in 2020. Five years removed from our initial thinking, it seems clearer than ever that identity is a defining force in political communication (e.g., Coles & Lane, 2023; Hopkins et al., 2025; Kreiss et al., 2024; Knüpfer et al., 2024; Kuo & Marwick, 2021; Lane et al., 2022; Lane et al., 2025; Mourao & Brown, 2025; Reddi et al., 2023; Smith et al., 2025; Wells & Friedland, 2023; Young, 2023). It also feels more pressing than ever to underscore how centering identity in political communication research can produce scholarship better equipped to deal with heightened attacks on democratic values and social justice. Put simply, many of the political challenges roiling communities across the globe are tied to issues of identity; scholars need to recognize this and meet the urgency of the moment.
We briefly discuss some ways in which the field can – and increasingly has – centered identity. We then extend this thinking into suggestions for how centering identity prepares scholars to tackle questions at the heart of political communication in times that are dangerous – for democracy and for scholars.
Identity and the Study of Political Communication
Identity can be understood as “a core perception of oneself vis-à-vis others and others vis- à-vis oneself that manifests simultaneously as demographic categories and structural locations” (McGregor et al., 2025, p. 219). Identity is dynamic, relational, and intersectional (Chávez, 2012; Cho et al., 2013) – complexities that add valuable nuance to its contours and also make it somewhat more difficult to study than some other objects of analysis.
To better understand how digging deeper into the nuances of identity can benefit political communication research, consider three domains that have long been major areas of study in this subfield: elite communication, journalistic norms/routines, and engagement.
Elite Communication
Studying the content, circulation, and effects of elite messages has been a staple of political communication research for as long as the subfield has existed. In some obvious ways, however, focusing too much on the communication of political leaders at the expense of other communicators narrows the range of identities researchers might study (e.g., focusing more on men than women and other gender identities, focusing more on wealthier individuals). And even as those in power come to represent a broader range of identities, research on elite communication has too often emphasized WEIRD (i.e., Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries (Rossini, 2023) and reproduced a “great orators” logic (Murphy & Lechuga, 2021).
Centering identity in the study of elite communication can take several productive forms. For example, scholars can focus on aspects of identity not yet familiar in most studies of elite communication (e.g., Smith, 2018) and/or highlight underrepresented groups relatively new to political power (e.g., Aswad & de Velasco, 2020). Another useful approach is to apply new lenses to elite voices that have long been included, thereby highlighting the key roles that identity plays in such familiar discourses (e.g., Griffin, 2019).
Journalistic Norms/Routines
Journalistic norms/routines is another familiar area of political communication scholarship where centering identity can be helpful. Scholarly work in this area documents how news production both reflects and reinforces broader systems of power – and yet political communication scholarship has insufficiently engaged with identity as a structuring force in these processes. Journalists’ identities – particularly gender, race, and ethnicity – shape access to sources, story selection, and story assignment (Heckman, 2023; Sui & Paul 2020). Research on campaign coverage demonstrates how gendered and racialized stereotypes influence press coverage of candidates (Meeks, 2012; McIlwain & Caliendo, 2014), though such scholarship often understates the institutional and structural roots of these disparities.
Scholarship on protest coverage provides a compelling case of how centering identity can shift both empirical findings and theoretical approaches. Whereas earlier work emphasized informational deficits, such as an overemphasis on protest tactics, recent identity-centered research rooted in critical perspectives demonstrates how protest coverage reproduces hierarchies of social struggle and criminalizes Black victims and protestors (Brown & Harlow, 2019; Mourao et al., 2021). These studies foreground identity and power, usefully deepening how we think about journalistic norms and routines. Despite these advances, identity-centered research remains sparse within political communication journals and tends to focus narrowly on race or gender. Substantial work remains to be done to more comprehensively integrate identity into the study of journalistic norms and routines.
Engagement
A third area of political communication research worth considering vis-a-vis identity is engagement. Identity fundamentally shapes both how people consume political information and, in turn, how they participate in the political sphere. For example, political, gender, and geographic identities influence media preferences, partisan activism, and the very opportunities individuals have for engagement (e.g., Freelon et al., 2020; Van Duyn, 2022). As politics has become more personalized, identity has only grown more central – structuring news repertoires, search practices, and the curated flows through which people encounter political content (Tripodi, 2022; Thorson & Wells, 2016). These approaches collectively demonstrate that engagement emerges from the interplay of multiple identity dimensions embedded in complex information environments.
Yet engagement research often sidelines questions of identity and power, revealing the costs of treating participation as inherently virtuous or identity-neutral. When work does center identity, a wider array of political participation becomes visible, including hidden or enclave forms of participation and networked counterpublic organizing (e.g., Clark 2025; Jackson et al., 2020). Moving beyond simply “controlling” for identity means producing scholarship that examines heterogeneous effects in the relationships between identity appeals and social movements and identity-based engagement with them – all of which can help expand our theoretical understandings of political action and resistance.
Meeting the Moment: Studying Identity in Dangerous Times
It is beyond the scope of this brief essay to recount the many considerable, growing dangers facing communities across the globe. Suffice it to say, democratic values are under attack in a host of places around the world, and these attacks are often grounded in issues of identity (Carrier & Carothers, 2025). Though global lessons about partial recovery from democratic backsliding point to a limited role for an academic subfield or individual scholars (Riedl et al., 2025), the stronger the academic community can stand – or even push – against democratic backsliding, the stronger a foundation upon which to recover.
How should political communication scholars proceed? We consider three complementary strategies stemming from the intersections of identity and political communication.
Identify Identity Overtly
Much of what scholars of political communication study is directly or indirectly about identity. But, too often, we do not categorize it as such – or at least do not do so with enough precision. Consider the issue of polarization, which researchers have studied extensively over the past several decades (e.g., Kubin & Von Sikorski, 2021). Polarization suggests that two political groups (e.g., liberals and conservatives) have moved apart ideologically. But if we talk about polarization only in those terms, we miss the starker reality that ideological extremism, often driven by xenophobia and racism, has been responsible for much of this movement. Being specific about the identity considerations at play in a given domain of research is crucial.
Identifying identity overtly also means taking seriously the fact that different identity groups have different relationships to political power – and these dynamics are crucial to correctly characterizing the implications of research findings. Staying with the polarization example, political communication researchers often bemoan the growth of polarization. This can mask the fact that, in some cases, what less polarization indicated was not harmony but rather the domination of one identity group by another. For example, in the U.S. context, “much of the broader polarization literature is framed against a supposedly normatively desirable time of less polarization—one that coincided with the existence of White racial authoritarian states in the U.S. South” (Kreiss & McGregor, 2023, p. 566). Identifying identity overtly allows for a more accurate accounting of the evidence while helping to ensure that crucial power dynamics are not left unexplored.
Adopt a Pro-Democracy Stance
Academic observers are increasingly realizing a crucial truth: The scholarly impulse toward dispassion and neutrality eases the path toward democratic backsliding. As Knüpfer et al. (2024) put it, “If the far right aims to undermine academic values and practices, then we must take a clear stance on what we are defending in our political communication scholarship.” What we are defending, most fundamentally, is pluralistic democracy (see Scacco & Coe, 2021). That system of government includes, crucially, the right of scholars to conduct research that might be critical of those in power.
Most studies of political communication have clear implications for pluralistic democracy; scholars are usually comfortable identifying those implications, at least in general terms. What they are less comfortable doing – yet what is now necessary – is identifying in concrete terms how our research findings might suggest danger for democracy and which political forces are creating that danger. In other words, we must be willing to point out democratic harm and say who is causing it.
This leads to two key points. First, the above strategy of identifying identity overtly comes into play again. It is not enough to blandly state that democratic norms have been degraded. We must instead say who is attacking those norms. Note how the Knüpfer et al. (2024) example above does exactly that, clearly calling out the far right. Studies of narrower contexts can and should be even more specific – identifying which political party, for example, is attacking democratic values (see also Griffin, 2019; Kreiss & McGregor, 2023).
Second, when political communication researchers adopt a pro-democracy stance, they both specify their findings more clearly and offer a needed reminder that the academy has an important role to play in the defense of pluralistic democracy. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have sought to constrain academic freedom (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2019) and scholars today are facing alarming attacks (Scholars at Risk, 2024). Those who seek truth wherever it leads are often at odds with authoritarians, and scholars should not shy from that challenge – though it would no doubt be helpful if their institutions supported them in those efforts.[1]
Use Language that Underscores the Stakes
Scholars studying political communication sometimes fall into the trap of being too cautious with their language. In fact, we almost fell into that very trap. When labeling the section of which this subsection is one part, we initially used the phrase “difficult times.” And that is true: these are difficult times. But it is more precise, and more productive, to call these “dangerous times” – because those are the stakes. Pluralistic democracy is in danger, as are many who seek to defend it. This includes, as has too often been the case, a disproportionate percentage of people who occupy minoritized identities, such as women, people of color, trans people and others in the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, and many others.
Not unlike journalists who, out of habit, give equal treatment to “both sides” even when the facts do not warrant that treatment, political communication scholars sometimes shy from terms that embed within them a judgment (e.g., autocrat, extremist, racist). It is these terms, though, that correctly underscore the stakes.
It is important to note that one needn’t seek conceptual clarity on their own. There is scholarly work with well-sourced definitions of terms like authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, hate-speech – and if our findings point to one of those things, we ought to say so (with citation, of course). This applies to a wide array of foundational political concepts. For example, if we are to describe a country as a democracy, in what areas are they succeeding – and where are they struggling? Sources like the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project provide well-documented and granular markers of democracy for a host of countries (Coppedge et al., 2025). And sources such as Cline Center for Advanced Social Research can build databases that allow the January 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol to not just be called a protest or a riot but an “attempted auto-coup” and “attempted dissident coup” (Cline Center, 2022).
Conclusion
In her book, TheBacksliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies, Susan Stokes (2025) introduces the concept of “trash-talking democracy,” wherein leaders attempt to retain public support while simultaneously transgressing democratic rules. Key to this strategy is that the leaders also stoke polarization, with identity appeals playing a significant role.
As political communication scholars, centering identity means examining the claims leaders make that might contribute to this kind of “trash-talking democracy.” It means being clear about the content, platforms, and systems of power that do – and do not – “work” for certain identity groups. And, yes, it might well mean shining a light on wannabe autocrats who weaponize identity appeals to stoke division and enhance their own power. That is what the success of pluralistic democracy demands, and it will be up to all of us to meet that challenge.
References
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Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 785–810. https://doi.org/10.1086/669608
Clark, M. D. (2025). We tried to tell Y’All: Black twitter and the rise of digital counternarratives. Oxford University Press.
Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. (2022, December 15). It was an attempted auto-coup: The Cline Center’s coup d’état project categorizes the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol. https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/coup-detat-project/statement_dec.15.2022
Coles, S. M., & Lane, D. S. (Eds.). (2023). Race and ethnicity as foundational forces in political communication: Special issue introduction. Political Communication, 40(4), 367–376. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2229780
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Hopkins, D. J., Lelkes, Y., & Wolken, S. (2025). The rise of and demand for identity‐oriented media coverage. American Journal of Political Science, 69(2), 483–500. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12875
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Kreiss, D., Lawrence, R. G., & McGregor, S. C. (2024). Trump goes to Tulsa on Juneteenth: Placing the study of identity, social groups, and power at the center of political communication research. Political Communication, 41(5), 845–856. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2343757
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Authors
Shannon C. McGregor (PhD, University of Texas – Austin) is an associate professor and a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) – both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research examines how media and technology shape social and democratic processes: communication, journalism, public opinion, and epistemologies of public life in democracies. McGregor’s interdisciplinary and mixed-method research has been published across fields including top journals in communication, political science, and sociology. She is co-editor of Media and January 6th (Oxford, 2024).
Kevin Coe is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, where he also directs the Edna Anderson-Taylor Communication Institute. He is the coauthor of two books, The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times (Oxford, 2021, with Joshua Scacco) and The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford, 2010, with David Domke), as well as numerous research articles. He is a past chair of the American Political Science Association’s Political Communication Section and the National Communication Association’s Political Communication Division.
There are increasing calls to center social groups or group identities in the study of political communication (e.g., Kreiss et al., 2024; Lane & Coles, 2024). To date, most work examines social groups as represented in and exposed to political communication. In contrast, little attention has been paid to how these groups create political communication themselves. However, increasingly politicians and citizens actively contribute to the political information environment, for example through direct communication on social media (Newman et al., 2024)—which are an important ground for social activism and identity politics (Jost et al., 2018). As group identities are salient when they are explicitly discussed (Turner et al., 1987), the identity of the communicator likely affects what and how they communicate about politics (Giles, 2012; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Therefore, how communicators’ group identities affect their messaging is an essential factor in contemporary political information environments.
In this brief article, I make a case for the study of social groups as active communicators, i.e., investigating how different groups communicate about (identity) politics. I label this political group communication. In order to promote its systematic investigation, I propose a framework that distinguishes between the group that one is part of and the group that they advocate for. This leads to four archetypal communicators in political group communication (Activist, Ally, Hegemonist, and Assimilator) that may guide the study of group members’ communication patterns, the perceptions of communicators, and the effects of their communication. This way, I aim to kickstart a systematic investigation of how social groups actively shape the political information environment.
Why Study Political Group Communication?
Political communication research has been slow to embrace group identity in its theories, research aims, and methodologies (Kreiss et al., 2024; Lane & Coles, 2024; McGregor et al., 2025; Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020). Identity-centering scholarship is obstructed by narrow methodological views on social science that excludes fields that study identity most thoroughly (McGregor et al., 2025) and the focus on Europe and the United States has narrowed the scope of what should be studied (Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020). However, the circumstances in these regions have changed dramatically over the last two decades. The far right has gained political ground, creating a context of overt denial of equal rights and threats to marginalized groups (Knüpfer et al., 2024; Noury & Roland, 2020). Perhaps in response, attention to identity in the field of political communication is growing (Kreiss et al., 2024).
The study of group identities in political communication can largely be divided into four lines of inquiry. First, work into media representation shows that marginalized groups are under- and misrepresented in journalistic media (e.g., Eide, 2011; Jamil & Retis, 2023; Poindexter et al., 2003). Second, research into groups’ media selection indicates that citizens gravitate toward news that bolsters their identities and avoid news that threatens them (e.g., Abrams & Giles, 2007; Appiah et al., 2013; Hiaeshutter-Rice et al., 2024). Third, research investigates how groups process political information when they are exposed to it. Similar to media selection, this shows that citizens tend to interpret information to strengthen positive group-based self-perceptions, and avoid negative ones (e.g., Boyer et al., 2022; Han & Federico, 2018; Kahan et al., 2007). Finally, studies examining the effects of political information about groups show that negative portrayals of minorities can cause harmful attitudes among the majority and self-exclusion among minority members (e.g., Lajevardi, 2021; Mastro & Kopacz, 2006; Ramasubramanian, 2010). This includes work that focuses on the way identities are affected by media (e.g., Boyer & Lecheler, 2022; Saleem et al., 2019).
While these lines of enquiry have led to crucial insights, they all study groups as objects of coverage and/or as consumers of political information. Social groups are represented in and exposed to political communication. We thus largely miss a systematic investigation of groups as active communicators about politics. In other words, there is a need for theory and knowledge about political group communication—what emotions, arguments, identity markers, or other aspects of communication members of different groups use when they (re)negotiate their positions in society through political communication.
Studying political group communication is imperative due to two major developments in the political information environment. First, political actors increasingly advocate overtly for or against subgroups of the population with a distinct group identity – they practice identity politics (Fukuyama, 2018; Klandermans, 2014; Noury & Roland, 2020). This means that political arguments are increasingly defined by differences in, for instance, nationality, race/ethnicity, geography, religion, ability, gender, or sexuality—forming a political cleavage between those who focus on universality and those who focus on the rights of particular social groups (Westheuser & Zollinger, 2024). In short, social groups and group identities have become more important in political communication. Therefore, understanding them is essential to understanding the political information environment.
At the same time, public debate is shifting from legacy to social media (Newman et al., 2024)—and thus from journalistically edited content to direct communication. The transition from legacy to social media platforms has led to important shifts in the ways messages are communicated and rewarded in terms of engagement. For one, social media facilitate social identification in protest movements (Jost et al., 2018), causing identity-related political content to thrive. Moreover, as group identities are salient when they are explicitly discussed (Turner et al., 1987), content creators’ relevant social identities are likely salient when they create identity political communication. This means that intergroup behavior is dominant in online communication about social groups or identity politics (Giles, 2012; Tajfel & Turner, 1986; Turner et al., 1987). Hence, the group identities of citizens creating such content should contribute to what they say and how they say it.
In sum, as overt identity politics and direct political communication increasingly determine the political information environment, it is essential to study how social groups communicate about politics—i.e., to study political group communication.
Roles in Identity Politics
In order to effectively study political group communication, one must consider group identity at two levels (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). First, feeling part of a group usually defines group membership in social psychology (idem). For instance, most readers of this article will feel part of a gender group, as gender is a particularly strongly socialized group identity (Burns & Kinder, 2012). Such self-identification with a group most likely guides group communication (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), especially in situations in which this group is particularly salient (Turner et al., 1987)—such as when someone is actively communicating about it. Second, dominant and marginalized groups denote a structural hierarchy in society (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Within gender, men are a dominant group compared to women. Women are perceived as less competent (cultural marginalization; Ellemers, 2018), are paid less for the same job (economic marginalization; idem), and are underrepresented in parliaments (political marginalization; Wängnerud, 2009). In an identity political discussion, one can thus be part of a relatively dominant or marginalized group.
Marginalized groups would benefit from an increased relative social status. However, to achieve this, dominant groups would have to give up some of theirs (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). From this perspective, it is thus often possible to distinguish between two sides of a debate—one that advocates for the marginalized group through a decrease in social hierarchy and one that argues for the sustained or strengthened hegemony of the dominant group. It follows that anyone taking part in such a debate can be part of the dominant or marginalized group, and they can advocate for one of them. While this simplification ignores the intersectionality of multiple identities that creates unique issues for subgroups that experience intersecting marginalization (Crenshaw, 1989), group interests are often experienced and structured in society as oppositional on a single dimension (Lowery et al., 2006). The #BlackLivesMatters movement, for example, silenced the issues of Black women by focusing only on race (Carney, 2016). While it is crucial to investigate how group experiences differ between intersectional groups and types of marginalization, which may affect their communication patterns, the structure of public debate determines individuals’ roles in identity politics, often defined by one dimension of identity.
Considering that individuals taking part in an (identity) political debate are (a) part of a social group in relation to the debate, and (b) argue in favor of a social group in relation to the debate, I propose to study political group communication through the four archetypal roles in Figure 1. I call dominant group members that advocate for ingroup hegemony ‘Hegemonists’ and marginalized group members that attempt to reduce the status hierarchy ‘Activists’. Following a plethora of earlier work (e.g., Droogendyk et al., 2016; Wiley & Dunne, 2019), dominant group members advocating for a reduction of status hierarchy are called ‘Allies’. In contrast, assimilating to the status hierarchy, marginalized group members advocating for dominant group hegemony are called ‘Assimilators’.
Figure 1. Archetypal roles in identity politics.
This framework may be utilized to study at least three aspects of political group communication. For one, it may address what communication looks like for each archetypal role. For example, arguments favoring the ingroup are consumed more often (Appiah et al., 2013; Knobloch-Westerwick & Hastall, 2010) and are better remembered (Schaller, 1992), especially when a group is specifically primed (Rule et al., 2010). As such, group members might have a preference to use arguments that include their group. For instance, natives may argue in favor of immigration because it is good for the economy—thus also for natives. Second, this framework may guide investigations of how communicators are perceived. For instance, allies’ political group communication can be perceived as performative (Olbermann & Reis, 2024) or selfish (Marshburn et al., 2021), suggesting the importance of perceived communicator authenticity. Third, the framework could help understand how messages affect receivers as communicated by each archetypal role. This may depend on a common relevant group identity between the sender and receiver (Mackie et al., 1990; Wilder, 1990), on the abovementioned perceptions about the communicator, and on individual attitudes and cross-pressures of other identities such as partisanship (Boyer et al., 2022). Particularly, the interaction between the message and the communicator’s identity may be of specific interest to maximize message effectiveness.
Conclusion
The discussion above illustrates how the four archetypal ‘roles’ presented in this paper may guide the investigation of three aspects of political group communication: the type of communication itself, perceptions of the communicators, and effects on audiences. This focus on group identity offers a fresh perspective, complementing the ubiquity of partisanship in political communication research (Hiaeshutter-Rice et al., 2024). As such, it is my hope that future studies will adopt this framework to investigate active political communication by social groups.
However, the current political situation requires responsible scholars to consider the risks involved in this kind of research. Specifically, in a context of increasing illiberalism and far-right threats to marginalized groups (Knüpfer et al., 2024), it is important that research supports the inherently democratic norm of equality between social groups—such as those based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or ability—rather than the forces that undermine it. Therefore, scholars using this framework should carefully examine for which purposes the generated knowledge can be used or abused. The first, descriptive, line of research—illuminating differences between the roles in terms of their emotions, arguments, and other aspects of communication—can be explored with relatively little concern. The findings may help expose tendencies and strategies on both sides that may be used to more effectively increase equality in contemporary democracies and undermine attempts to the opposite. However, the second and third avenues for research—the exploration of perceptions of communicators of different groups and of the persuasive effects of political group communication—should be treated more carefully in order to avoid designing a playbook for antidemocratic forces. In this way, researchers can assure that the use of this framework may help create a world with more equality, a world with more democracy.
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Author
Ming M. Boyer is a research associate in Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, focused on group identity in political communication and negativity in politics and media. Currently, he holds a NWO Veni grant on political group communication, combining manual and automated content analyses with experimental research. Dr. Boyer has published in leading journals such as Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and the European Journal of Political Research. He currently serves on the editorial board of Human Communication Research.
Affective polarization has emerged as a defining force in contemporary societies, reshaping not only politics but everyday social life. What now drives division is less disagreement over ideology or policy, but the emotional charge attached to political identities, manifesting in distrust, moral disdain, and hostility toward outgroups. Rather than polarization as merely ideological distance, it is the affective dimension — who we fear, resent, or refuse to engage with — that is reshaping sociopolitical dynamics. Such developments create fertile ground for the normalization of illiberalism and democratic erosion (Bennett & Kneuer, 2024; Kingzette et al., 2021; McCoy & Somer, 2021). These concerns are not abstract: The January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, similarly motivated attacks in Brasilia on January 8, 2023, the rise of far-right parties across Europe, and the global backlash against immigration illustrate how emotionally fueled identities can mobilize conflict and destabilize democratic norms. Recent scholarship advances this discussion by conceptualizing destructive polarization, which is characterized by the breakdown of communication, discrediting information, and exclusion through emotions, among others (Esau et al., 2025). Recognizing affective polarization as part of this broader disruptive dynamic underscores the need for more precise and critical scholarship in this area.
Against this backdrop, identity becomes key to understanding affective polarization. Indeed, the field of political communication should (and is well-equipped to) center the communicative aspects of identity, particularly social identity, in the study of affective polarization. The role of identity in political communication has already been addressed in the preceding essay of this edition and in recent scholarly exchanges, including a noteworthy contribution in Communication Monographs (McGregor et al., 2025). Terms like “identity politics” and “culture wars” now permeate public discourse on democratic decline, social fragmentation, and political extremism. Their invocations often overlook how social identities are communicated – unintentionally invoked or strategically leveraged – in both mediated and everyday contexts. While identity vis-a-vis polarization can be studied from myriad angles, approaching affective polarization through the communicative lens of social identity opens new directions for political communication research. The objective of this essay is thus to introduce conceptual linkages across disciplines, subfields, and bodies of literature, and to organize them around three thematic areas: (1) conceptual clarity, (2) multi-level perspectives, and (3) key actors in identity mobilization. This is by no means an exhaustive endeavor, but a set of modest prompts for better understanding the connection between social identity and affective polarization.
Upholding Conceptual Precision
Few concepts in the social sciences are as ubiquitous—or elastic—as identity and polarization. In everyday discourse, identity is often equated with personal uniqueness, lifestyle, or self-expression. Especially in Western contexts shaped by individualization, identity tends to be framed as something internal and private. Personal identity, however, never exists in isolation. Individuals are embedded in relational networks and social categories that provide belonging and meaning. Social identities, such as those tied to nationality, religion, partisanship, gender, or region, form integral components of the self-concept. These identities are not merely “held” but shaped in manifold ways via social interactions. The desire to maintain a positive social identity is closely linked to social identification and comparison processes, which can foster ingroup favoritism (Harwood, 2020). When such “positive distinctiveness” comes at the expense of an outgroup, derogation and distrust may follow—and affective polarization can take root. Moreover, while a single social identity can already motivate such polarization, multiple overlapping identities may either reinforce or temper intergroup hostility depending on the perceived overlap (Roccas & Brewer, 2002).
Affective polarization, then, is best understood as an expression of identity-based boundary-making. Political communication research has typically examined it through partisan or political group identities, drawing on social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), self-categorization theory (Turner et al., 1987; see also Oakes et al., 1994), and intergroup emotions theory (Mackie et al., 2008). Affective polarization is often defined as “the extent to which partisans view each other as a disliked out-group” (Iyengar et al., 2012, p. 406). However, political parties are only one of many possible identity anchors: outgroup animosity may also emerge along other lines. Identification with broader opinion camps (e.g., pro-Palestinian, MAGA) or policy stances (e.g., anti-immigration, anti-vaccination) often blends ideological disagreement with intergroup emotions and identity signaling (e.g., Gianolla, 2025; Kim et al., 2024). Nearly one-third of publications on affective polarization extends the concept beyond partisan divides to racial, territorial, religious, or opinion-based identities (Shoai, 2025), reflecting a shift toward understanding affective polarization through identity affiliations alongside political fault lines.
Taken together, these developments illustrate why social identity and affective polarization remain conceptually diffuse (e.g., Bakker & Lelkes, 2024). The term polarization often describes a trajectory—a dynamic process that involves social sorting (i.e., the alignment of political and other social identities; see Mason & Versteegen, 2025) and emotional hardening—rather than a fixed state. This raises questions about when we are observing affective polarization specifically or instead describing social fragmentation, alienation, or disengagement. Clarifying what is being polarized, along which identity dimensions and through what communicative processes, creates ample room for more cumulative and comparative research. At the same time, research linking identity and polarization must also attend to questions of status, hierarchy, and power relations between social groups, including their discursive manifestations, since these dynamics fundamentally shape how identities are experienced and contested (Balinhas, 2023). One fruitful development has been to use the social identity approach as a communicative frameworkthat shapes language, belonging, and emotional attachment to groups (Harwood, 2006; Hogg & Tindale, 2005).
Advancing Micro- and Meso-Level Perspectives on Identity
The study of social identity and affective polarization would benefit from more scholarship at multiple levels of analysis. In multiparty systems, coalition politics can blur or sharpen boundaries between groups, challenging assumptions largely derived from US-centric, two-party models. Comparisons should also account for variation in civil liberties, civil-society strength, and people’s understandings of democracy, all of which can shape whether and how identities become politically salient. While important comparative work has illuminated how social identity and affective polarization unfold across political systems and societies (e.g., Bantel, 2023; Harteveld, 2021; Park & Warner, 2024; Reiljan et al., 2024), the following emphasizes the micro- and meso-level dynamics underlying these processes.
At the individual level, social identity conditions how people attend to and interpret identity-relevant political information. Social identification provides cognitive shortcuts for navigating complex environments but also fosters selective exposure and motivated reasoning. Individuals are more likely to seek and trust content that reinforces existing identities, while dismissing or counterarguing dissonant cues (e.g., downplaying scientific facts from a distrusted outgroup). These confirmatory biases serve core identity functions, specifically social identity motivations. People seek to gratify underlying needs through political communication, particularly social enhancement and social uncertainty reduction (Joyce & Harwood, 2020).
As identity-based motivations and needs intensify, information processing can become more defensive and affectively charged, especially when identities are perceived as threatened or contested. In these situations, individuals often distance themselves from supporters of rival groups and respond with anger when their ingroup feels threatened (Renström et al., 2023). The result is not just preference alignment but identity-congruent affective filtering. The dynamic at play reverses the spirit of the familiar warning “don’t shoot the messenger”; that is, rather than separating message from messenger, people tend to evaluate the content through the lens of who delivers it. The identity of the communicator then becomes a heuristic for whether a message is trustworthy and status-enhancing––or identity-threatening. Even ideas consistent with one’s values may be dismissed if voiced by an ideological rival. Such moments of ambivalence are psychologically difficult to manage, as accepting the message may feel like disloyalty toward one’s ingroup while rejecting it may conflict with one’s principles. In such cases, the message source is marked as an outgroup and messages are filtered not on their substantive merits but on the perceived identity implications of accepting them. Judgments thus become identity-based rather than issue-based, fueling affective polarization.
At the meso level, identity is reinforced through interactions within socially sorted networks. People do not assemble randomly into communities; they cluster with those who share salient identities, especially when politics becomes a site of boundary-making and boundary-defense. Social homophily (e.g., in neighborhoods, on digital platforms) concentrates communication among like-minded others, increasing in-group cohesion while limiting cross-cutting contact. These group settings amplify identity salience by offering continuous cues about “us” and “them,” and normalizing corresponding emotional and discursive repertoires (e.g., members of far-right online communities using contempt or defiant humor not just as rhetorical devices but as shared modes of expression that signal belonging and loyalty). However, within these cohesive spaces, intragroup polarization can also emerge, as members navigate pressures toward conformity alongside motivations for distinctiveness, sometimes motivating like-minded groups to adopt more extreme positions through internal discussions (Harel et al., 2025).
Actors in Identity Mobilization
A major strand of polarization research examines how elite actors are perceived as key sources of division (Ploger, 2024; Seimel, 2024). With their institutional powers and agenda-setting capacities, political elites are seen as primary drivers of affective polarization. Their combative rhetoric often resonates with highly motivated voters, creating reciprocal incentives for continued polarization. The concept of issue entrepreneurship (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020) explains how elites strategically make certain issues more salient to reap electoral benefits––a logic extended to polarization entrepreneurs (Jezierska et al., 2024; Mau et al., 2023) and identity entrepreneurs, who deliberately activate or weaponize social identities (e.g., by attacking pluralism) to mobilize supporters and shape public sentiment (Scacco & Coe, 2021, p.136). The concept of identity ownership, building on the more familiar notion of issue ownership, follows the same line of thinking (Kreiss et al., 2020).
A meso-level, actor-focused perspective shifts analytical attention to organizational actors embedded in civil-society networks. Both reactionary groups (e.g., anti-immigrant, nationalist groups) and progressive groups (e.g., climate justice or refugee solidarity networks) strategically employ identity markers to foster ingroup cohesion and mobilize collective action around shared visions, goals, and emotions. In such contexts, groups often operate as ‘affective publics’ (Papacharissi, 2016) or ‘emotional communities’ (Koschut, 2024), where collective emotions such as outrage or hope are cultivated and amplified through digital platforms.
An often-discussed corrective to polarization is to elevate superordinate identities that cut across factional boundaries. Under favorable conditions, invoking broader categories can encourage cross-group communication and dampen outgroup animosity. For example, “rally-round-the-flag” effects show how national identity can temporarily supersede partisan divides (Kizilova & Norris, 2024). While often arising in threat-based context, such an identity may also revolve around the idea of civic or constitutional loyalty as a unifying element. Similarly, climate justice movements may appeal to a common human (or global) identity that emphasizes shared responsibility for humanity and future generations (Pong et al., 2023). These appeals aim to bridge divides, though they are often constrained by individual lifestyle preferences and macroeconomic interests.
Such efforts illustrate how elites and activists alike can deploy identity-enhancing strategies to cultivate intergroup solidarity. However, the integrative power of superordinate identities is highly contingent: Where common ground erodes, shared labels lose their ability to mobilize. Appeals to U.S. national identity, for example, no longer reliably encourage intergroup contact in certain situations, presumably because individuals no longer perceive the nation as a ‘jointly owned’ or equally representative enterprise (Neumann, 2021). When social sorting is profound, the promise of an inclusive identity clashes with the reality of an already deeply affectively polarized public (Dawkins & Hanson, 2024). Conversely, identity-threatening strategies weaponize symbolic and social boundaries to provoke outrage, resentment, and outgroup hostility, even violence. Anti-immigration rallies, for instance, portray migrants as threats to national culture or welfare systems, using emotionally charged claims and symbols (e.g., flags, heritage markers, memes, hashtags) to mobilize fear and reinforce exclusionary identities (Ekman, 2019). Thus, depending on actors’ goals and contextual conditions, the same identity frame may be invoked and reinforced to justify restrictive immigration policies or to promote civic solidarity in humanitarian crises.
Concluding Remarks
Affective polarization warrants sustained attention because it erodes trust and norms on which democracy depends. In today’s dissonant public spheres, shaped by complex digital environments and fragmented information flows (Pfetsch et al., 2023), identity-centered discourses intensify as emotions are amplified online. When citizens view political disagreement not as a contest of ideas but as conflict between groups—and ‘the other side’ as an existential threat—the social fabric disintegrates. Understanding this identity-polarization nexus is therefore crucial, as belonging and boundary-making, not merely ideological divergence, fuel political conflict. Examining identity-centered communication is thus key to understanding how affective polarization takes root and how it might be mitigated. Political communication scholarship has much to contribute to this endeavor by illuminating how communicative processes sustain and transform these divides.
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Author
Rico Neumann is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin and a research fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany. His research focuses on intergroup phenomena from a political communication, news media, and public opinion perspective. As part of the Einstein Research Unit Coping with Affective Polarization, he currently examines how civil society groups navigate polarized information environments, with a particular emphasis on discursive dynamics and communication strategies. His scholarship has been published in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, Communication Monographs, International Journal of Communication, Journalis
The relationship between political identities and information repertoires can be understood as a recursive one. Information repertoires shape, reinforce, and potentially change political perceptions and preferences, while political preferences drive selective media use (Aruguete and Calvo, 2023; Stroud, 2011; Tóth et al., 2022). Although we know these processes are dynamically intertwined, a new set of empirical questions is emerging in the field of political communication because both information repertoires and political identities are rapidly shifting in contemporary societies.
In this piece, we aim to problematize and identify some of the challenges for political communication research that emerge from the study of contemporary information repertoires, particularly when it comes to understanding the formation of political identities. Drawing on recent and ongoing empirical studies conducted in Chile and Brazil that address transformations in news consumption and the impact of influencers as sources of information and affective connection, we take a (quite preliminary) approach to two broad and interrelated questions that must certainly be answered through a collective effort. First, to what extent consuming content primarily through personal, algorithm-driven devices affects people’s information repertoires? And second, what do these shifts mean for the ways individuals shape and negotiate their identities in post-partisan settings?
A couple of clarifications before going any further.
Firstly, we use the term information repertoires deliberately to refer to the variety of content that people are exposed to, including professionally produced news from journalistic outlets as well as content generated by other types of creators. Although these formats can be analytically distinguished (and we try to do so here), our empirical findings suggest that this is not how users experience them. Individuals are exposed to high volumes of highly fragmented, non-hierarchical information consumed through the same devices and applications. Social media use routines make different types of formats, content, and their sources blur together and are difficult to distinguish. In users’ memories, some sources tend to merge as time passes (Vergara et al., 2020).
In our view, the blurring boundaries in daily media usage forces us to rethink information repertoires from the perspective of day-to-day practices. This has potential implications for how information repertoires are theorized and operationalized. This issue is particularly relevant for populations who get their news predominantly through social media — a growing trend in most Latin American countries, including Chile and Brazil. According to the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report, more people in both countries get their news from social media than from traditional media outlets, including their online versions. Additionally, 46% of their populations report that they avoid the news often or sometimes (Newman et al., 2025).
Secondly, we locate the discussion about political identities in post-partisan scenarios because traditional partisan identities are proving insufficient to represent relevant social cleavages and to account for how people locate themselves in relation to others in society (Rovira Kaltwasser, 2021). Chile has seen an upsurge of anti-elite sentiments (Argote & Visconti, 2023), while experiencing a dramatic decline in party identification over the last three decades (de la Cerda, 2022). In turn, Brazil has seen a more significant lack of party affiliation among younger generations (TSE, 2023). In both Chile and Brazil, anti-party sentiment is stronger than adherence to parties (Meléndez, 2022). These transformations — shared with other Latin American countries and beyond — suggest that some of the categories traditionally used to account for political self-placement might also need rethinking. We believe it is essential to recognize that political identities are not limited to the organization of sensitivities across the left-right spectrum or to adherence to traditional party cleavages. People do not generate in-group and out-group distinctions solely by adhering to specific parties or groups, but also by rejecting specific political parties—or all of them—giving rise to negative forms of partisanship and anti-establishment identities often exploited by populist rhetoric (Meléndez, 2022).
Likewise, identities can certainly be studied and explored in a much broader sense as cultural struggles for recognition based, among other factors, on nationality, gender, ethnicity, or race, which are embedded in unequal power relationships within a given society (Fraser, 1995). These multiple and often cross-sectional struggles for recognition also shape political identities and are mobilized by political actors, having the potential to generate dynamics of social inclusion, but also dynamics of exclusion and oppression. Critically addressing these differences is relevant, as it involves examining the power asymmetries that exist between the groups promoting identity-based discourses, as well as their positions in society (Kreiss et al., 2024). In Brazil, race and class were, for example, successfully mobilized by former President Jair Bolsonaro to embolden whiteness as an identity for middle-class Brazilians, who played a pivotal role in his ascension to power (Porto, 2023). In Chile, nativism has been used by the ascending radical right to construct both indigenous populations and immigrants as out-groups threatening the homogeneity of the nation (Rovira Kaltwasser and Zanotti, 2023).
With these antecedents in mind, how can we move forward to better understand the relationship between information repertoires and political identities?
News use and political identities, some challenges ahead
If political identities are broadly defined, there are many ways of thinking about how they relate to news use. One of them is the extent to which news use is politically motivated. Research in the region has shown that in contexts of increased polarization, a pro-attitudinal pattern tends to prevail: people prefer contents aligned with their beliefs and perceive counter-attitudinal news as biased (García, Brussino and Alonso, 2020). Likewise, in the wake of negative news, partisan individuals avoid stories that question their political camps, while political adversaries increase their consumption of such stories (Aruguete and Calvo, 2023). In this vein, Orchard, Aruguete and Siles (2025) identified the relationship between ideological disputes and news consumption as a line of research that requires further development in Latin America.
However, we argue that the field still has a wider range of questions to explore—questions that extend beyond the cognitive-attitudinal perspective, which mostly frames selective exposure to belief-consistent content as a driver of political and affective polarization. This line of inquiry is important. In fact, there is currently an open, active, and inconclusive debate about the extent to which selective digital consumption leads people to hold one-sided views of public issues and limits their exposure to different perspectives (e.g., Guess et al., 2018; Tornberg, 2022). Nonetheless, there are many other relevant questions to ask in this context. For example, what incentives exist on digital platforms (electoral, commercial, attentional) for political and non-political actors to promote polarizing discourses? Which actors are profiting from the construction of polarization strategies? What modes of representation and mediation have become more or less important in algorithmically curated environments? Another big important question, as Kreiss and McGregor (2024) argue, is about the power asymmetries that underlie how different groups draw on polarizing discourses and attempt to promote them from positions of privilege against marginalized populations. We have recently observed this in Chile and Brazil. In Chile, for example, the exaltation of national traits, and the electoral weaponization of discourses about migration, have led to dehumanizing narratives and support for punitive and exclusive policies. In the Chilean 2025 presidential elections[1], the right-wing favorite for winning the final ballot José Antonio Kast has declared that he would make illegal immigration a crime. Another of the candidates, Franco Parisi, who finished third place in the first round, said if he was to be president, “no foreigner will be in first place in the line to house, school, health and security”. Johannes Kaiser, aligned with the extreme right, who finished in fourth place, stated that “Chilean politicians have betrayed his own people on maintaining an open border policy”.
In our view, this line of research could also be expanded if a broader definition of political identities is incorporated into our analysis, including negative partisanships, populist worldviews, and anti-establishment predispositions as guiding interpretative frameworks used by people not only to observe and participate in their political environments but also to make decisions about their information repertoires. In recent focus groups and interviews conducted with Chilean audiences regarding their use of news, we have encountered narratives of rejection toward news outlets and specific stories based on political discordance with one’s own views, but, more importantly, a suspicion of bias as a default position with respect to a wide variety of informative sources, especially those that professionally produce news. As a result, we observe folk theories about news production that are often driven by skepticism and distrust of the media and the information it provides. This distrust forces people to constantly monitor their environments in search of certainties, combining both professional and non-professional information sources in their news diet. As a result, evaluative discourses about news become based on idiosyncratic relevance criteria that could be translated into the idea of “news that is relevant to me or the people I trust.” Accounting for hybrid and — allegedly deinstitutionalized — forms of information consumption is a theoretical and empirical challenge for political communication researchers.
Beyond news use: identity and content creators
Social media is the main source of news for Chileans (42.3%), followed by online news websites (35.4%), both scoring higher than any traditional media (Mellado & Cruz, 2025). Nevertheless, it is somewhat difficult to dig deeper into the meaning of these scores, since social media feeds are personalized, algorithmically curated, and negotiated by users who try to “game” such curation (Cotter, 2018). Additionally, social media environments are hybrid information sources where day-to-day expressions and concerns mingle with public issues (Milan & Barbosa, 2020) creating alternative influence networks (Lewis, 2018). These hybrid content feeds, where users stumble upon news rather than intentionally consume it, are a central issue in discussing political identity formation when nurtured by such media sources.
Those personalized feeds consumed through individual mobile screens are interconnected thanks to the social affordances of digital platforms. Feats, interviews, mentions, hashtags, collabs, and other platform features connect content and authors motivated by a myriad of reasons, ranging from mutual commercial interests (broadening the network of followers) to political alignment. One way or another, the connections—either enforced by users tagging each other or more overtly triggered by algorithms—create what Pavez and colleagues (2025) call “circuits of meaning”: overlapping networks of connections between content that generate chains of meaning. In other words, independent content niches are repeatedly interconnected, creating patterns of information, values, and worldviews. In the Brazilian case, for instance, in the orbit of religious discourses lie other content niches seemingly unrelated, such as old money (traditional rich families), new rich, and financial investors, creating a pattern of navigational flow that repeatedly reinforces the connection between these topics (Pavez et al., 2025). These connections are not at all obvious or intuitive. Instead, they emerge from sociotechnical interactions between people, content, and algorithms.
Recent studies in Chile and Brazil point to different levels of political alignment among popular content creators on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. While in Brazil, political polarization has created pressure on digital influencers to take a stand in domestic politics (Rocha et al., 2024), in Chile the same phenomenon has not been as pronounced. Instead, content creators have been, thus far, more subtle, leaving ideological stances and worldviews more implicit or veiled under daily life content. As such, a TikTok video in which a Chilean exchange student celebrates the possibility of discussing sexual dissidences as an issue in undergraduate studies abroad (see Marianaback, 2025) could be interpreted as a progressive position, though there is no clear or explicit political alignment voiced by its author (Pavez et al., 2025). Even more subtle is the defense of worldviews or values that are not necessarily political in essence, such as hard work and meritocracy. While in Brazil, meritocracy has been captured by the extreme right, interlacing it with other issues such as faith, self-discipline, and positive thinking (Pavez et al., 2025), it could equally be framed to support left-leaning values and actors, such as issues of structural inequality, the privileges behind elites’ social capital, and so on.
In the context of weak party identification and a low level of agreement on trusted shared sources, this sort of political–non-political content becomes valuable as an entry point to observe what kind of values, ideology, and worldview are promoted, by whom and for what purposes.
Although the analysis of the relationship between people and news still partly revolves around traditional media, limiting information repertoires to this sphere seems reductionist. This approach is also removed from the realities we have observed in our fieldwork, especially considering growing generational differences in media consumption habits. The increased use of social media platforms demands theoretical and methodological imagination in order to account for the fragmented and individualized feeds that nonetheless crystallize into circuits of meaning. Through these circuits, users connect daily events, ideas, and values.
This apparent informational chaos resulting from accelerated changes in content consumption behaviors is also fertile ground for research in political communication. To this end, we consider it essential, first and foremost, to embrace calls to place concepts of power and struggles for recognition at the center of our research questions. Furthermore, we believe it is essential to recognize the opportunity that social media offers in terms of rich data to explore identity articulations like those we currently observe, which elude traditional classifications.
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Authors
Ximena Orchard is an associate professor at Universidad de Santiago de Chile, an Associate Researcher at the Center for the Study of Media, Public Opinion, and Politics in Chile (MEPOP), and director at the Center for Public Communication Studies (CECOMP). Her research examines the relationships between journalists, political actors, and audiences in contexts of social crisis and democratic contestation.
Marcelo Santos is an associate professor at Universidad Diego Portales and a researcher at the Center for the Study of Media, Public Opinion, and Politics in Chile (MEPOP-Chile) and at the National Institute for Science and Technology in Digital Democracy (INCT.DD-Brazil). His research focuses on the intersection between digital technologies and democracy with a focus on Latin America. He has authored peer-reviewed articles on top tier communication journals such as Political Communication, New Media & Society, IJPP, Social Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Mobile Media & Communication and others.
[1] See the debate on immigration here (Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQE6Ca1kcqI
Intersectionality provides a lens to understand how multiple identities overlap and interact to shape political life. Rather than existing in isolation, categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, and migration status intersect in ways that condition political participation, representation, and perception. Intersectionality denotes the ways identity categories intersect to produce distinct experiences and requires moving beyond single-axis theorizing in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of social and cultural phenomena (Cho et al., 2013). Such combinations of categories illustrate what I refer to here as “identity bundles”: intersecting categories (e.g., origin × gender × migration type) that are activated together in media portrayals and cannot be reduced to single markers. In fact, research in political communication has long demonstrated that race (Hutchings & Valentino, 2004) and gender (Andrich & Domahidi, 2024; Van Der Pas & Aaldering, 2020) matter in how politicians and citizens (Lind & Meltzer, 2020) are covered and evaluated. Intersectionality advances these insights by showing how these categories multiply overlap with structural locations of power (Cho et al., 2013).
The stakes are clear: who is made visible, how groups are framed, and how audiences respond all depend on intersecting identities. Ignoring this not only overlooks marginalized groups but distorts our understanding of media effects and democratic inclusion. Yet political communication has tended to treat identity superficially, rarely asking what is learned by centering identity (McGregor et al., 2025). This is even more acute for intersectional identities, which are seldom addressed in their own right. The omission is consequential: without an intersectional perspective, political communication risks mischaracterizing how messages are produced, circulated, and received. This contribution highlights that intersectional identity cannot be treated as a side note to political communication but a mechanism shaping visibility, framing, and effects.
Intersectional Visibility and Framing
Intersectional visibility gaps
Visibility in media is not simply about whether political actors appear, but about which combinations of identities are present or absent. Communication research now conceptualizes visibility not only as presence but also as valuation. A recent review highlights that feminist and critical race perspectives see visibility as structured by intersectional power relations, yet systematic analyses of absence remain rare (Stehle et al., 2024). Research consistently shows that women remain structurally underrepresented across news systems (Beckers et al., 2024), and are almost absent from high-visibility roles, reflecting how age and gender intersect to exacerbate exclusion (Jürgens et al., 2022). In migration coverage, migrant women are doubly marginalized, appearing far less frequently than migrant men or majority women (Lind & Meltzer, 2020). Recent research further shows that visibility interacts with partisanship: highly visible Democratic women attract more negative coverage, while Republican women receive less coverage despite similar offices (Andrich, 2025). These examples underline that visibility gaps are not additive but intersectional: being a woman and a migrant, or a woman and Republican, produces qualitatively different patterns of (in)visibility.
Asymmetric framing
How individual and social groups are framed depends systematically on intersecting identity cues. In electoral coverage, women politicians, especially in high-status offices or addressing “hard” issues such as the economy or security, are less often framed through substantive expertise and more often through personality or novelty than their men counterparts (Andrich & Domahidi, 2024; Van Der Pas & Aaldering, 2020). In crime reporting, gendered violence is overwhelmingly covered episodically, yet perpetrator origin or race shifts these patterns. Violence by migrant or non-White men is more often explained through cultural or religious traditions while violence by White or non-migrant men is individualized and excused (Chagnon, 2020; Meltzer, 2023; Pepin, 2016). Immigration coverage similarly applies differentiated repertoires. Men refugees are more frequently portrayed in threatening contexts such as crime or terrorism, while women refugees appear predominantly in victimization or humanitarian frames (Blumell & Cooper, 2019; Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017). Comparative reviews further suggest that distinct groups are associated with distinct types of threat: Roma with economic, North Africans with cultural or security, and Eastern Europeans with welfare-related concerns (Eberl et al., 2018).
These dynamics of intersectional biased visibility and framing underscore that intersectional identity bundles, rather than single categories, determine both who enters public consideration and what interpretive frames audiences receive once they do. Visibility and framing thus operate together as mechanisms that preconfigure subsequent media effects, shaping not only whether groups are seen but also how they are understood.
Intersectional Media Effects
Mechanisms
Intersectional portrayals influence how audiences respond. Evidence from adjacent literature show that race × gender asymmetry affects perceived trustworthiness (Valmori et al., 2023), determine person–position fit (Hall et al., 2015), perceptions of and reactions to displays of remorse in jurors’ decision-making processes (Zhao & Rogalin, 2024), and decisions to shoot criminal suspects (Plant et al., 2011). These studies show how identity bundles distinctly shape perception, attitudes, and behavior. Yet surprisingly few works in political communication have tested such dynamics directly.
It has been shown that origin and migration type interact to produce divergent evaluations: Middle Eastern refugees tend to elicit more negative orientations among right-leaning audiences, while African refugees foster more positive reactions among left-leaning audiences (Meltzer et al., 2025). Beyond immediate reactions, repeated exposure can consolidate such asymmetric responses into more stable perceptions. Research on crime news shows that the chronic overrepresentation of Black suspects fosters durable associations between Blackness and criminality, leading to harsher culpability judgments for Black suspects whereas White suspects are more readily excused. Such findings show that identity cues become chronically accessible, shaping judgments over time. Importantly, these entrenched responses do not remain confined to social group evaluations. Exposure to racialized crime news has been shown to prime racial attitudes that spill over into broader political judgments, including evaluations of political candidates (Valentino, 1999). This shows that intersectional cues recalibrate the criteria by which citizens evaluate political leaders, situating them at the center of political communication research.
Intersectional dynamics extend beyond portrayals to how users themselves engage with media. Research shows that racial identity conditions political expression on social media, with White people (vs. Black, Asian, and Hispanic people) having a higher probability of engaging in different forms of political expression (Lane et al., 2022). Asymmetries further surface in disproportionate online harassment against (younger) women and minorities (Chen et al., 2018; Vogels, 2021) Gehrke and Pasitselska (2024) identify identity propaganda, logics of exclusion, and gendered disinformation as mechanisms through which false or misleading content exploits identity-based cues and deepens divides. Taken together, these studies show that intersectional cues matter not only in how groups are portrayed, but also in how citizens negotiate, reproduce, and resist identity-based communication online.
Conditionality
Media effects of intersectional portrayals are conditional rather than universal. Audience predispositions moderate how cues are received, but the identity bundle itself is part of the treatment. For instance, left-leaning respondents report more positive views with increased exposure to migration news, while right-leaning respondents exhibit more negative responses, particularly toward Middle Eastern refugees (Meltzer et al., 2025). Thus, the same narrative can reverse its effects depending on the group portrayed and the audience. A portrayal of Middle Eastern refugee men framed through threat and populist rhetoric may generate fear and hostility among right-leaning audiences, while coverage of refugee women from Africa in humanitarian contexts may foster compassion among left-leaning audiences. Intersectional identity bundles thus operate as triggers that interact with predispositions to shift both the strength and direction of effects. Recognizing this conditionality is crucial for political communication: it highlights that representation is not a background factor but part of the treatment that shapes how citizens evaluate both marginalized groups and political leaders. This pattern is consistent with broader evidence showing that predispositions, values, and motivated reasoning condition media effects (Andrews et al., 2017; Avdagic & Savage, 2021; Schemer, 2012; Shen & Edwards, 2005).
In addition, this conditionality extends beyond message reception to how users express themselves online. Studies of political expression on social media illustrate similar audience-based dynamics. Previous results indicate that posting about political issues had little independent effect on support for Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter, but political expression interacted with levels of racial resentment. Among less resentful users, frequent expression was linked to reduced support for BLM, whereas no such effect appeared among high-resentment users (Coles & Saleem, 2021). Together, these findings illustrate that identity-based predispositions condition not only responses to media portrayals but also the dynamics of user expression.
Towards an Intersectional Political Communication
Advancing an intersectional political communication requires both conceptual and methodological innovation. Intersectionality should not be understood as endlessly multiplying categories, but as a framework to refine existing theories and to explain why some effects appear stronger, weaker, or absent. Methodological work shows that different strategies are possible for managing complexity, whether comparing across categories, focusing within, or challenging categories altogether (McCall, 2005). This flexibility underscores that intersectionality is not about cataloguing every possible intersection, but about identifying which ones matter most for political outcomes. Intersectionality also offers a way to extend established theories of media effects. The critical media effects framework demonstrates how power, context, and intersecting identities can be systematically integrated into agenda-setting, framing, and priming research (Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020). Null findings should therefore not be discarded too quickly; they may indicate that categories have been specified too broadly, masking differential effects across identity bundles. In this sense, intersectionality is both a theory-building tool and a diagnostic lens for refining political communication models.
Methodological implications follow. Measuring at scale through text and visual pipelines allows for systematic analysis of intersectional cues. Stimulus construction in experiments should explicitly cross identity cues while holding other features constant to isolate interactive effects. Intersectional political communication can also learn from adjacent fields. For example, recent work on consciousness-raising practices in social movements demonstrates how race is reconfigured not simply as a demographic marker but as a relational category embedded in political education and organization. Such perspectives from critical ethnic studies and feminist of color scholarship remind us that methodological rigor requires theoretical openness: intersectionality cannot be fully captured by crossing categories alone but also by tracing how identities are cultivated and contested through communicative practice (Grover & Kuo, 2023). At the same time, field-level constraints need attention. The discipline of political communication has been critiqued for reproducing structural exclusions in its own practices of authorship and citation (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Freelon et al., 2023), and for continuing to privilege WEIRD-based models while treating Global South work as supplementary rather than as theory-generating (Rossini, 2023). Limited diversity produces blind spots: what is treated as a relevant category, which intersections are tested, and which contexts are theorized as generalizable. A field that remains centered on WEIRD scholars risks narrowing its own questions and overlooking variation that is politically consequential. Recognizing these constraints is part of developing a truly intersectional field.
A future agenda follows from these considerations. Scholars should disaggregate broad categories, study identity bundles directly, and test systematic frame × identity interactions. Analyses should also trace cumulative exposure across platforms, recognizing that intersectional portrayals circulate in hybrid media systems. Building shared infrastructure (stimulus banks, coding standards, transparency tools) would enable cumulative progress. At the same time, effects research must be contextualized: media influence is always shaped by historical and cultural conditions (Rojas & Valenzuela, 2019). While most studies cited in this paper focus on intersections of gender and origin, comparable interaction mechanisms may apply to other bundles (e.g., socioeconomic status, sexuality, age). Extending systematic tests to these domains will broaden the scope and validity of effects research in political communication.
Conclusion: Representation Is Part of the Treatment
The preceding sections have shown how intersectional portrayals structure visibility and framing, how they activate mechanisms of media effects, and how audience predispositions condition these outcomes. By showing that the same message can produce opposite effects depending on the intersectional identities portrayed and the predispositions of audiences, this line of research underscores that intersectionality is not simply a question of representation but a central mechanism of political attitude formation and thus – mitigated via democratic processes – influence which policies might be implemented affecting the groups in question. As such, intersectionality should be placed at the core of political communication scholarship, both theoretically and methodologically, to better account for the heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory ways in which media shape democratic opinion formation. Representation is not background but part of the treatment itself. By taking intersectional identity seriously, we sharpen theoretical explanation and empirical prediction. At stake are both academic rigor and democratic inclusion: who is seen, heard, and counted in the mediated public sphere.
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Author
Christine E. Meltzer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Journalism and Communication Research at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. Her research examines the role of media in shaping perceptions of social inequality and intergroup relations. She focuses particularly on the media representation of migration, refugees, and gender, the coverage of violence against women, and the portrayal of women in popular culture such as music videos.
This article explores how political identity emerges within connected multitudes —those hybrid collectivities that act simultaneously in the street and online, where communication itself becomes a form of political being-together. Using feminist ethnography and digital observation of Mexico’s protest cycle between 2016 and 2022, it takes this case as an entry point to reflect on what ethnography can offer to political communication research: a way of understanding identity as lived, relational, and communicatively enacted. I argue that, in contemporary political communication, identity is performative and relational: it does not precede interaction but takes shape through the communicative practices of a networked multitude.
Feminist movements in Mexico, expressed through what I call femitags —feminist hashtags (Rovira-Sancho & Morales-i-Gras, 2022) like #NiUnaMenos, #VivasNosQueremos, #MeToo), offer a privileged field to understand how peer-to-peer communication and embodied protest weave new collectivities of sense. In these connected multitudes, first-person testimonies turn private pain into public claim; affects circulate, bodies gather, and cities are reconfigured as living archives of protest. What begins as a hashtag becomes a body in the street, and later an inscription in urban space —a continuum where communication, emotion, and matter co-produce identity.
The article thus proposes that the connected feminist multitude functions as both a communicative infrastructure and an epistemic challenge to modern notions of the “people,” sovereignty, and individuality. Identity, in this context, is less a label than a practice: the collective performance of visibility, care, and refusal that interrupts the silence sustaining patriarchal violence.
Situated Methodology
Political communication has been largely shaped by quantitative and experimental paradigms that prioritise messages, senders, and receivers. Yet this approach, grounded in measurement and representation, often overlooks how political meaning is lived, embodied, and collectively enacted (Karpf, 2016). Scholars such as Papacharissi (2015) have called for methods capable of capturing affective publics, while Couldry and Hepp (2016) remind us that communication is not merely the transmission of information but a practice that constructs social reality. In this context, ethnography —particularly feminist ethnography (Abu‐Lughod, 1990)— does not offer a marginal alternative but an epistemological shift (Blánquez, Flórez & Ríos, 2012). Bodies, as Butler (2015) notes, also communicate politically by gathering, by occupying space, by appearing together.
Understanding identity within political communication requires attention to hybrid communicative ecosystems (Treré, 2019)—where streets, screens, bodies, and institutions converge to produce political subjectivity. While quantitative approaches and data analysis of online interactions offer valuable insights into the scale and circulation of messages, they are insufficient to understand how identity is lived, felt, and collectively enacted. These processes cannot be grasped solely through metrics or digital traces; they demand sustained, participatory observation—placing one’s physical and digital body within the unfolding of protest.
This research involved participant observation in marches, assemblies, and occupations; field diaries, interviews with activists, and daily engagement with digital platforms where hashtags, testimonies, livestreams, and visual repertoires shaped how protest was organised, felt, and remembered.
Beyond a list of techniques, this approach is grounded in the feminist principle of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988). The “field” emerges not as a place but as a continuum between streets and networks, where political meaning is produced through bodies, digital media and shared affects. Following Latour’s (2005) idea that “the social” consists not of a stable domain but of ongoing processes of association, I approach feminist mobilizations not as fixed entities but as living networks of relations.
Ethnography, in this sense, does not merely document protest; it inhabits it and becomes one more node in the chain of associations through which feminism is communicated, embodied and made visible. This perspective expands what we mean by political communication. Rather than a linear flow, communication appears as a situated, material practice—made of hashtags on screens, bodies in the street, rage and chants. Politics is communicated not only through campaigns or media framing, but through the daily labour of sustaining protest—where collective identity is continuously formed, negotiated, and held together.
The Connected Multitude and the Feminization of Collective Action
An ethnographic approach to feminist mobilizations calls for theoretical frameworks capable of grasping their hybrid condition. It is at this intersection—between bodies, networks, and emotions—that identity emerges as a communicative process.
The concept of the multitude, formulated by Italian autonomist theorists (Virno, 2003; Negri & Hardt, 2004), helps us think twenty-first-century aggregation beyond the Hobbesian “people.” Against a sovereign unity that erases differences, the multitude—following Spinoza—“persists as plurality in the public scene, in collective action, in attention to common affairs, without converging into a One” (Virno, 2003: 21). The multitude needs neither a central command nor an “empty signifier” organizing hegemony, as Laclau (1996) proposes, because its potency lies in cooperative heterogeneity. Today, this irreducible plurality becomes visible in connected multitudes acting both in situ and online—what we might call onlife.
Historically, the multitude was the feminine of the political: that which had to be excluded so the “people,” masculine and sovereign, could appear as a rational, unitary subject. As Virno notes, liberalism neutralized “the many” through the public/private divide. That confinement had a sexed body: women were enclosed in reproduction and care, erased from public life. The feminist multitude returns as the insurgency of what modern politics expelled—shared dependence, vulnerability, and the reproduction of life.
Latin American digital feminism embodies this turn: awareness of structural gendered violence circulates online and propels bodies into the streets. It marks the irruption of a different rationality—a politics of interdependence that replaces the sovereign logic of the One with the multiplicity of a We. In practice, networked feminist mobilizations enact precisely that: communities of meaning that denounce sexual violences and feminicides and acuerpan (hold, shelter, accompany) victims and families. Once dismissed as “impure” or “incoherent,” the multitude becomes the condition for rethinking politics in feminist key: open, connected, embodied.
From the Hashtag to the Body and Back: Opening Political Space
As Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us, “the political does not consist primarily in the composition and dynamics of powers, but in the opening of a space through action itself” (Nancy, in Marchart 2009: 105). Feminist mobilizations make this opening tangible: they transform fear into appearance, silence into speech, and vulnerability into collective strength.
In Mexico, this process crystallized in what the media began to call “the women’s protests” —an impossible subject, since it did not preexist as a unified entity. It was neither all women, nor those who identified as such, but a multiplicity of bodies refusing silence. The political here was not represented but enacted communicatively.
Online, hashtags such as #MiPrimerAcoso or #MeToo condensed countless personal stories into shared grievances. These femitags —digital speech acts— made visible “those who have no part” (Rancière, 1996), the uncounted whose suffering had been normalized or erased. Testimonies became a public vocabulary of pain and rage, generating new frames of recognition.
At the same time, in the streets, thousands shouted: “My body is mine, I decide, I have autonomy, I am my own!” Their bodies completed what the hashtags began. Yet the circulation was not unidirectional. The embodied scenes of protest —chants, graffiti, performances— returned to the networks, where they were livestreamed, memefied, and re-signified, feeding new waves of mobilization. The communicative energy of the movement moved from the digital to the corporeal and back again, producing an onlife continuum of feminist visibility.
What the hashtag opened, the body occupied —and what the body enacted, the network amplified. This reciprocal movement blurred the borders between communication and action, turning expression itself into infrastructure.
Crucially, activists hacked corporate digital platforms not through code but through use: transforming spaces built for entertainment, consumption, and individual branding into arenas for collective encounter and political contagion. Twitter threads became collective archives; Instagram stories became channels of mutual aid; and memes became weapons of critique.
It was the perception of imminent danger that triggered action: women marched to embrace —acuerpar— those already murdered, knowing they could be next. Through this recognition of shared vulnerability, fear was transfigured into solidarity. That affective transformation produced what Raquel Gutiérrez (2014) calls a “nosotras expansivo” —an expansive We that unbinds women from their assigned social roles and activates insurgent agency. Mothers of femicide victims became furious organizers; middle-class daughters turned incendiary; professionals exposed sexual abuse in their workplaces.
The feminist multitude disrupted the coordinates of political normality. It overflowed traditional organizations and occupied public space in “inappropriate” ways: shouting, burning, occupying, breaking reputations and urban infrastructure alike. Online and offline, the living invoked the dead, prefiguring a community of destiny whose fatality they sought to undo.
In this continuum, communication is not an accessory to politics —it is its very substance. The hashtag, the body, and the city are interconnected modalities of a single process: the communicative making of collective identity.
The Year Everything Caught Fire
In 2019, feminist mobilization in Mexico reached a breaking point (Rovira-Sancho & Morales-i-Gras, 2023). The digital and the embodied ignited each other in a loop of outrage and recognition that reshaped political communication itself.
The year began with a sector-based #MeToo wave—#MeTooEscritores, #MeTooMúsica, #MeTooAcademia—that multiplied in dozens of collective Twitter accounts. Women spoke because every story met a chorus of #YoTeCreo —I believe you—, and because thousands recognized in each thread not an isolated case but a shared structure of violence. The hashtags became archives of experience and catalysts of political subjectivity.
The digital sphere quickly overflowed into physical space. University walls filled with tendederos of denunciation —paper lists of abusers’ names— while assemblies occupied classrooms and faculties. The voice became handwriting; the hashtag became graffiti. What had circulated online now insisted on occupying walls, plazas, and avenues.
The turning point came that August, after a series of police rapes in Mexico City. The hashtags #NoMeCuidanMeViolan (“They don’t protect me, they rape me”) and #AMíMeCuidanMisAmigas (“My friends keep me safe”) summoned thousands to the streets. Young women sprayed pink glitter on police officers, and filled the city center with slogans and smoke. The media denounced “vandalism”; politicians promised order. The response —#FuimosTodas (“It was all of us”)— short-circuited the logic of criminalization and reasserted the feminist multitude as shield and chorus: every act of disobedience belonged to all.
That August became known as the glitter revolt: a performative explosion where anger turned luminous and art became weapon. The Antimonumenta #VivasNosQueremos, erected in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, anchored the uprising in both the street and the feed. Groups like Restauradoras con Glitter documented hundreds of inscriptions and argued that what needed restoration was not marble but the social fabric itself.
The city turned into an interface: murals, songs, stencils, and livestreams produced a new cartography of resistance. Amid this storm of words, images, and bodies, another current of memory joined the flow: the mothers searching for their disappeared and murdered daughters. Their annual Marcha por la Dignidad —held every 10 May— had long embodied a politics of love as perseverance: “We search for them because we love them.” In 2019, their presence at feminist marches deepened the rebellion’s time horizon. The immediacy of rage met the endurance of mourning, linking the glitter of protest with the dust of the search fields.
That continuum reached its peak in March 2020, when the largest women’s march in Mexican history filled the capital’s avenues under the cry “Vivas nos queremos” —We want ourselves alive. The next day, a massive women’s strike, coordinated almost entirely through social networks, brought the country to a standstill: workplaces, schools, and public offices emptied of women.
Feminists transformed urban space into a living archive: in 2021 and 2022, the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan —Roundabout of the Women Who Fight—, a purple silhouette replacing the statue of Columbus, surrounded by the names of murdered and disappeared women. Walls, fences, occupied institutions and monuments became heterotopias of resistance —spaces where communication became matter and mourning became message. The city itself spoke the nosotras expansivo: we were here, we are here, we will remain until justice arrives.
Conclusion
Throughout the 2016–2022 cycle, identity was not represented but made communicatively. From online testimonies to graffiti and monuments, feminist communication redefined what counts as political speech and who is allowed to speak.
The Mexican case also reveals the instability —and the creative force— of this insurgent identity. The feminist multitude disrupted all predictable alignments: progressive and conservative camps traded accusations; leftist governments denounced the protests as excess; feminist factions fractured over gender and trans issues. These tensions evidence that feminist communication operates through multiplicity rather than unity.
Thus, the connected feminist multitude redefines the role of identity in political communication. No longer a marker of belonging to a preexisting group, identity becomes a collective act of appearance and disruption. It is communication performed through hashtags, chants, flames, and inscriptions —a choreography of care and fury that interrupts the normalization of patriarchal violence. Seen through an ethnographic lens, this performative role of identity becomes visible as an ongoing process of making and unmaking the social through embodied connection.
In that persistence of the many —plural, embodied, furious— identity is not representation but the ongoing rebellion that refuses female subordination and gender violence. Feminist multitudes destabilize fixed alignments and construct a “we” as powerful as it is precarious if judged by the lifespan of unified organization. The point is not to lament dispersion but to recognize how identity here is practice, not predicate: acting, denouncing, caring, and acuerpando—in the streets and online, in an onlife continuum. Feminist ethnography, by staying with bodies, affects, and relations, allows us to perceive these processes not as abstractions but as lived practices of collective becoming.
References
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Couldry, Nick, & Hepp, Andreas. 2016. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Polity Press.
Gutiérrez, Raquel. 2014. “Política en femenino.” In Más allá del feminismo, ed. M. Millán. México: Red de Feminismos Descoloniales, 87–98.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 24(3): 575–599.
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Rovira-Sancho, Guiomar, and Jordi Morales-i-Gras. 2022. “Femitags for Feminist Connected Crowds in Latin America and Spain.” Acta Psychologica 230: 103756.
Rovira-Sancho, Guiomar, and Jordi Morales-i-Gras. 2023. “Idus de marzo en México: La acción directa en las redes y en las calles de las multitudes.” Teknokultura 20(1): 11–24.
Virno, Paolo. 2003. Gramática de la multitud. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Author
Guiomar Rovira-Sancho is a Full Professor of Political Science at the University of Girona, Spain. She is a specialist in social movements, political communication, feminisms, and digital networks. Based in Mexico for 28 years, she taught as a full professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City until 2021. She has authored five books, including #MeToo. La ola de las multitudes conectadas feministas (Bellaterra), Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas (Icaria-UAM), Zapatistas sin fronteras (Era), Women of Maize (LatinAmerican Buro), and Zapata vive! (Virus/Sexto Piso). She currently leads two research projects: “Digital Violence Against Women in Political Leadership”, and “Digital Feminist Activism in Latin America: From the Internet to the Critique of Artificial Intelligence”. Her email is: guiomar.rovira@udg.edu
Jasmine English, Assistant Professor, Reed College
Project title:
Carceral Political Discussion
Publication reference:
English, Jasmine. 2025. Carceral Political Discussion. Working paper.
Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research
This project began from a simple question: what counts as “political talk” and for whom? Most measures of political discussion capture only the liberal-democratic “first face” of the state (elections, parties, institutions). But for many Americans, especially Black Americans, the most immediate and consequential face of the state is the carceral one: police, courts, correctional systems. I wanted to understand whether everyday conversations about policing and criminal justice function politically even though they fall outside conventional survey items. The project grew out of a broader interest in how racial power structures shape the lived experience of citizenship and what we count as participation.
Summarize the main takeaway of your project.
Black Americans discuss policing and the criminal justice system more than white Americans — reversing the conventional discussion gap — and these conversations have distinct consequences for efficacy, identity, and engagement.
What made this project a “polcomm project”?
The project tries to reconceptualize what counts as political discussion and examine how citizens communicate about different faces of the state. By combining survey methods with “analytic listening” to real-world conversations from the Fora platform, the project demonstrates that what we talk about and the political implications of that talk vary significantly by the domain of politics under discussion. In so doing, the project expands the boundaries of political communication research beyond traditional electoral-representative topics.
What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)
The most challenging aspect was developing a valid measure of carceral discussion content. Rather than assuming which topics matter, I used grounded theory and “analytic listening” to inductively identify discussion topics from 44 real-world conversations on the Fora platform. This involved multiple rounds of qualitative coding to develop a battery of positive and negative carceral discussion topics. If I were to start again, I might expand the initial listening phase to include more diverse conversation settings and explore additional carceral domains like immigration enforcement earlier in the process.
What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?
There is growing interest in bringing the carceral state into the study of political behavior and communication, but much of the field still defaults to liberal-democratic institutions as the anchor of “politics.” I would love to see more work that treats the state as multifaced and coercive, and that foregrounds how marginalized groups learn about politics through policing, punishment, and surveillance. Methodologically, I also hope to see more efforts to use listening and ethnography not only to illustrate but to build survey instruments.
What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)
My next step is to extend the analysis to immigration enforcement and child protective services, two institutions that similarly blur the line between “public policy” and surveillance. More broadly, I see this as part of an effort to reconceptualize participation from the standpoint of those who experience the state primarily as regulation and threat rather than as representation.
From left to right: Alessandro Nai, Chiara Valli, Jürgen Maier and Loes Aaldering
Award won:
Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year in the field of political communication (2025)
Name(s) & affiliation:
Alessandro Nai, University of Amsterdam
Chiara Valli, University of Bern
Jürgen Maier, RPTU
Loes Aaldering, Free University Amsterdam
Project title:
Gendered Backlash Depends on the Context: Reassessing Negative Campaigning Sanctions Against Female Candidates via Large-Scale Comparative Data
Publication reference, link (APA 7th):
Nai, A., Valli, C., Maier, J., & Aaldering, L. (2025). Gendered Backlash Depends on the Context. Reassessing Negative Campaigning Sanctions Against Female Candidates via Large-Scale Comparative Data. Political Communication, 42(3), 454-475.
Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research
This piece was the result of intense collaboration, and friendship, that we have developed over the years. One way or another the four of us have all worked on attack politics, both using experiments and via large-scale data to disentangle “universal” from context-related dynamics. But we have also been a bit frustrated about some results in the literature (including in some of our previous research) regarding the role of gender in attack politics – specifically, the lack of results where, on paper, there should have been plenty. And decided to dive into it.
Summarize the main takeaway of your project.
The starting point is rather straightforward: everything we know about the dynamics of gender in politics, and the structuring role of gender stereotypes against women in politics, specifically, suggests that women should be more punished than men when they go negative on their rivals. Yet, the literature only shows little and scattered evidence that this is the case. How could this be? Our intuition is that perhaps we have not been looking at the right place. If gender stereotypes matter, then their effect should be higher in contexts (i.e., countries) where cultural norms are more unfavourable towards women – contexts, in other words, where gender equality is less pronounced. We leveraged a large dataset that covers more than 700 candidates having competed in elections across almost 100 countries worldwide, and that is exactly what we found: the penalty against women for going negative is much more severe in countries with low gender equality.
What made this project a “polcomm project”?
While intrinsically this is a project about the role of gender (stereotypes) in politics, what we focus on is the ways in which “going negative” – that is, attacking political opponents during election campaigns – backlashes for those who engage in it.
What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)
We have long considered adding an experimental component to it, to show mechanisms (e.g., the intervening role of stereotypes). We even had in our hands some data in this sense, that we had collected for a different project. But we never really managed to make the large-scale observational and the experimental components “click” together. One reason, of course, is that our main claim is comparative – that women face a higher backlash in less egalitarian contexts. So a one-shot experiment (in our case, we had access to data from the USA) was not really ideal. We decided to drop the experiment, and only focused on the large-scale observational data. Abd that worked quite well.
What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?
Replications! Our data is quite awesome (I am not really objective, here, even if it is), but no data is perfect. In our case, one of its limitations, that we discuss at nauseam but that remains a concern, is that the data comes from expert judgments. On the plus side, this allows to have a really large-scale dataset, that adopts a holistic understanding of the election campaign (vs., e.g., “only” looking at what candidates say on social media). On the downside, experts can be biased. So, our results need to be replicated with other data. Really, get in touch with us if you have such data. On top of this, we still itch to show that the effects resit a controlled environment and are “causal” (yes, I know, I know). We really want to do an experiment that allows us to test for this differential effect of the context. So perhaps a large-scale comparative experiment? That would be great but is not cheap. Reach out if you could envision a collaborative study in this sense.
What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)
We all work on slightly different things, while coming together often to do some joint work (on negativity, notably). But here are some cool stuff that we have been busy with on our separate side recently
Alex has been working on the roots of political violence, looking for instance at the role of violent episodes via natural experiments. See for instance: Nai, A., van Erkel, P. F., & Bos, L. (2025). Violence Against Politicians Drives Support for Political Violence Among (Some) Voters: Evidence from a Natural Experiment. Public Opinion Quarterly, nfaf010. https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/89/2/310/8117288
Jürgen has recently been working on the mechanisms that can lead to the use of negative campaigning. See for instance: Maier, J., Oschatz, C., Stier, S., Dian, M., & Sältzer, M. (2025). Beyond rationality. Toward a more comprehensive understanding of the use of negative campaigning. European Political Science Review, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773925000025
Loes is currently working on a project on sexist campaign attacks (and how women candidates can respond to that – together with Alex!), various projects related to gendered political socialization, and has a continuing interest in gendered political stereotypes, see for instance: Van Der Pas, D., Aaldering, L., & Bos, A. L. (2024). Looks like a leader: Measuring evolution in gendered politician stereotypes. Political Behavior, 46(3), 1653-1675. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-023-09888-5
Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student Paper Award Committee
Name(s) & affiliation:
Rex Weiye Deng; Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis
Project title:
Screened Realities: How Entertainment Fosters Political Compliance in Autocracies
Publication reference:
Under review
Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research
I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis. I primarily study authoritarian politics and political communication, with a regional focus on China.
The motivation for this research grew out of two converging observations. First, about a decade ago I noticed a striking revival of anti-corruption TV dramas and documentaries in China—programs that exposed official misconduct yet were produced and promoted by the state itself. As these shows became immensely popular and spurred public discussion rather than suppression, I found myself asking: why would an authoritarian regime allow seemingly self-critical entertainment, and how might it use that content to shape citizens’ beliefs?
Second, recent scholarship in the U.S. has shown that entertainment (rather than news) can influence political attitudes, beliefs about mobility and fairness, and even public policy preferences. That research made me realise that entertainment is far more than “just fun” media—it’s a form of political communication, ripe for analysis across regimes. Together, these strands motivated me to explore how entertainment—its production, narrative, and dissemination—becomes a tool of political influence, especially in non-democratic systems.
Summarize the main takeaway of your project.
My project shows how China’s regime uses “problem-revealing entertainment” in the past decade—TV dramas and documentaries that expose corruption but highlight reform—to boost perceptions of government competence and accountability.
What made this project a “polcomm project”?
This project is a political communication study because it examines how media narratives (and more specifically, entertainment) shape citizens’ political perceptions. The focuses of this study, including persuasion, framing, and media effects, are at the heart of the field. Like other influential research on soft news, infotainment, and narrative persuasion in American politics, it explores how entertainment can influence political attitudes by embedding messages in engaging stories.
Extending these insights to an authoritarian context, the project shows how the Chinese regime uses “problem-revealing entertainment”—TV dramas and documentaries that dramatize corruption but highlight reform—to improve perceptions of competence and accountability. By combining theories of narrative persuasion with empirical tests of attitude change, it demonstrates even under settings of strong authoritarian control, narrative-based communication operates through familiar mechanisms of realism and immersion, which are central to political communication research.
What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)
Two big things. First, social desirability bias. Measuring regime evaluations is sensitive, so next time I’d build a list experiment into the primary outcomes (alongside the Word Association Test I used and the “bury-in-filler” item ordering) to further reduce demand effects. The challenge was getting honest attitudes in an authoritarian context; I mitigated it with WAT, dispersed political items, and a placebo drama arm, but a list experiment would strengthen inference about true beliefs.
Second, a tighter test of the mechanism. I’d add an alternative, apolitical control (e.g., a nature or sports recap matched on length/production value) to cleanly separate “narrative immersion” from “political content.” If budget allows, I’d also use a two-stage design that independently varies (a) realism/negativity (systemic-corruption vs isolated-case edits) and (b) immersion (coherent recap vs disrupted/segment order), with preregistered checks for perceived realism, engagement, and counter-arguing. This would more rigorously test whether problem-revealing entertainment → immersion → persuasion drives the effects beyond any generic entertainment exposure.
What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?
Recent work by Eunji Kim has revitalized the study of entertainment and political communication in democratic contexts. Her AJPS article “Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility” (2023) and her forthcoming book The American Mirage (Princeton University Press, 2025) show how reality TV and entertainment media reinforce the myth of meritocracy and shape citizens’ beliefs about inequality and mobility. Together with Kim and Patterson (2024, APSR), these studies highlight how non-news entertainment can subtly sustain political worldviews, echoing classic soft-news research by Baum (2002) but using new psychological and experimental tools.
Building on this wave, future research could go beyond audience effects to analyze the supply side of entertainment—how political contexts shape what gets produced, who produces it, and under what constraints. As I argue in this project, examining how regimes (or even democracies) co-opt cultural elites, navigate institutional boundaries, and embed ideology in narratives would open the “black box” of media control and cultural production. This supply-side lens, which are largely understudied in the political communication literature, could connect comparative authoritarian research with American political communication by linking production incentives and media market dynamics to the downstream formation of attitudes and behaviors. Also, more research should examine how different forms of entertainment—dramas, documentaries, variety shows, or online streaming content—affect political attitudes and behaviors across diverse contexts.
What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)
My follow-up projects build on this study by further examining the political consequences of entertainment in authoritarian contexts. One ongoing project investigates how historical dramas that glorify emperors’ lives and achievements shape individuals’ contemporary support for strongman rule. Beyond authoritarian settings, I am also expanding this research agenda to explore how entertainment narratives can be harnessed to address pressing social and political challenges, such as reducing political misperceptions and fostering more informed public engagement.
