The increasing use of misinformation and growing social and political polarization form a vicious circle: political entrepreneurs are incentivized to spread misinformation about the outgroup and citizens are increasingly motivated to engage with misinformation. In this study, we focus on one direction in this causal relationship: the preference among consumers to assimilate biased media. We do so in Côte d’Ivoire, a highly polarized context where misinformation is rampant and has even had violent consequences.

The talk presents theoretical and empirical research on the challenges to the core features of representative democracy as an attempt to combine the broad inclusion of citizens in the democratic process with efficiency of policy making and problem solving. It addresses the critique mounted by technocratic claims and highlights the tension between the holistic technocratic, and populist, conceptions of representation and pluralist representative democracy.

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Discussant: Ebenezer Azamati

Christo Grozev is lead Russia investigator with Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence. He will offer insights from Bellingcat’s work during the Ukraine crisis. Christo’s work focuses on security threats, extraterritorial clandestine operations, and the weaponisation of information. His investigations into the identity of the suspects in the 2018 Novichok poisonings in the UK earned him and his team the European Prize for Investigative Journalism.

This series is an opportunity for DPIR DPhils to present their work in progress and gather feedback.

zoom.us/j/97023514597?pwd=c01kNms5b1JJQlR4c21zTitOOFhjZz09

While dislike of opposing parties, i.e., affective polarization, is a defining feature of contemporary politics, research on this topic largely centers on the United States. We introduce an approach that analyzes affective polarization between pairs of parties, bridging the US two-party system and multiparty systems in other democracies. Our analyses of survey data from 20 Western democracies demonstrate that affective polarization is closely linked with patterns of electoral representation: that is, who serves in office and electoral system proportionality.

In armed conflicts across the globe, the loci of violence change over time, including across state borders. Nonetheless, both academic and policy analyses are typically still guided by static units of analysis and hence fail to capture spatial change in conflict. What explains change in the territorial scope and location of violent events in a single setting of armed conflict? We argue that shifts in two factors contribute to patterns in spatial change across conflicts: the relative strength of the state actor and whether there is a change in the conflict’s dominant actors.