THE TELEVISION SERIES The Bold Type tells the fictional story of three young adult women, Jane, Kat, and Sutton, navigating challenges in their professional and personal lives while working at a fashion magazine in New York City. In the third episode, Kat, the social-media director for the magazine, is trolled online for publishing an article about how virtual reality (VR) technology is more likely to make women experience motion sickness than men (Weyr 2017). As the nasty tweets, rape threats, and harassment escalate, the viewers watch Kat and her friends arrive at different strategies for handling the trolls.
JANE: Maybe you should stop looking.
KAT: Oh, jeez. Oh, yeah, I’m a slut because I took a topless photo of myself in the south of France. What is wrong with these people?
SUTTON: Okay, hey, look. It’s not all bad. The CEO of a VR company tweeted at you. Emily Ramos says “Sorry for what you’re going through. I support you and have your back.”
KAT: Oh, wow. Followed immediately by someone who thinks my boobs aren’t that great. [Starts typing a response] “He says as he takes a break from masturbating in his parents’ basement.”
JANE: Come on. Don’t engage.
KAT: I’m not engaging, Jane. I’m fixing this.
Kat’s fictional story reflects a contemporary reality: incivility is increasingly a part of our online experience. While incivility comprises a relatively small part of the total text in Internet comments sections (Coe, Kenski, and Rains 2014; Muddiman and Stroud 2016, 14), it has nonetheless become a creeping presence on social media. And it has become even more central to political discourse in the past few years as Americans elected a president who is particularly prolific on Twitter. The New York Times keeps a running list of the “People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter” since he declared his candidacy in 2015. The list started with 199 items; as of February 2019, it had grown to 567 entries, many of which had been insulted multiple times (Lee and Quealy 2019). As incivility becomes more prominent in online political discourse, those who are active on social media—whether for fun or as part of their job—must figure out how they are going to respond when things get nasty.
Kat’s experience is emblematic of that of many female journalists who regularly face online incivility and harassment as part of their job. In a series of interviews with women in journalism around the world, Gina Chen and her colleagues (2018) found that many journalists have specific strategies—blocking users, filtering out comments that include specific words—for combatting trolls; others shift how they cover the news, focusing on positive stories or showing multiple sides of issues to avoid abuse. The approach an individual journalist takes is to some extent dictated by the institutional norms and practices of her own media outlet, but it is also a matter of personal preference and comfort when faced with conflict.
Ultimately, Kat decides that the solution to handling the trolls is to engage with civil comments online, while simultaneously giving Emily Ramos, the VR CEO, the first shot at working with the magazine to develop VR fashion tools. Before she arrives at this decision, however, we see different reactions to targeted online incivility. Kat’s gut reaction is to respond to the trolls, matching their incivility and aggression with her own insults and outrage. Jane, on the other hand, encourages her “not to engage,” to step away from Twitter and, in doing so, protect herself from the barrage of hate.
Why do Jane and Kat have these divergent reactions to incivility? And what are the consequences? In this book, I explore how a personal predisposition—conflict orientation, or one’s innate reaction to conflict—shapes how the American public reacts to incivility. Political thinkers and democratic theorists worry that incivility threatens the survival of American democracy. Without mutual respect and tolerance, we are incapable of arriving at compromises in public policy or agreement about national identity and values (Mill [1859] 1989; Gutmann and Thompson 1996). Yet modern critiques of civility’s democratic role point to its power to silence dissent and maintain an unequal status quo (Chafe 1980; Zerilli 2014).
The ideal tone of discourse falls somewhere in the balance: a politics grounded in mutual recognition and respect, where incivility is only employed strategically to call attention to cases where that respect is absent. In the absence of this ideal, I argue that we must pay greater attention to individuals’ reactions to routine incivility—the incivility experienced when you turn on the television or open your social-media apps—while recognizing that those reactions will differ among people.
Individuals experience conflict in different ways. Some people enjoy arguments and are perfectly comfortable entering a shouting match in public; others are uncomfortable at the sight of an argument and avoid face-to-face confrontation. I expect that people on the polar ends of this spectrum of “conflict orientation” will have different emotional and behavioral reactions to contemporary in-your-face politics, regardless of their gender, partisan identity, or ideological commitments.
Kat, for instance, finds arguments exciting. She is quick to jump into the fray, whether to fight back on Twitter or argue with a man on the street when he insults her Muslim friend for wearing a headscarf. Jane, on the other hand, is naturally inclined to avoid conflict. She shies away from confrontation in most situations and worries about how to deal with conflicts with her boss, her boyfriend, or the subject of her latest news piece. It is no surprise, then, that when faced with uncivil comments, the two women have very different responses. You can sense Jane’s anxiety about engaging with the Twitter trolls, and her response—“don’t engage”—demonstrates her desire to step away from the conflict. Kat, on the other hand, is angry with her attackers, and one senses an underlying enthusiasm for the fight. These two women have a lot in common—age, occupation, education, political perspectives—yet their reactions to incivility lead them to very different behaviors. This book focuses on those reactions: the interaction between conflict orientation and incivility in political media. How does the presence or absence of incivility in television coverage of politics and in entertainment differentially affect us?
The media cover political issues ranging from economic deficits to immigration policy to appropriation of funds to Planned Parenthood as civil or uncivil, sometimes all within the same sixty-second television package. Those who are uncomfortable with conflict, whom I call “conflict-avoidant,” are anxious and disgusted in the face of incivility. But the “conflict-approaching” react with enthusiasm or amusement to the same coverage. Besides this store of positive feelings toward political coverage, the conflict-approaching will go on to participate in more political activities, particularly those in which they might face conflict and incivility themselves.
Incivility causes a set of Americans to engage in politics, but it can also alter the quality of that engagement. Incivility breeds incivility. As citizens see name-calling and vitriol as part and parcel of elite political communication, they are more likely to use it themselves. The conflict-approaching, however, are equipped with more armor in the battle for civil discourse. They react more positively toward incivility than their conflict-avoidant peers, but they are less likely to search it out in their media diet and no more or less likely to use it in their own political discussions. In the meantime, they are more engaged in political activities beyond voting—they protest, they call their representatives, and they attempt to persuade their peers. Just as time, money, and skills act as resources for citizen engagement in politics (Brady, Verba, and Schlozman 1995), so too does one’s psychological response to conflict.
Our reactions to incivility are, of course, not only a reflection of our orientation toward conflict. Incivility is strategically deployed by politicians, journalists, and citizens alike (Herbst 2010), and our response is contingent on our relationship to those using the language and our own preferences and identities. It should be no surprise, then, that our partisanship colors our identification of and reaction to incivility. When incivility comes from their own party or affiliated media (e.g., MSNBC for Democrats or Fox for Republicans), people are more likely to use incivility themselves, but they are also likely to depolarize, becoming more ambivalent about the two political parties. When incivility is used in attacks against their party, however, people are not only more likely to use incivility in their own responses, they are also more likely to react by moving to the extremes (Gervais 2015; Druckman et al. 2019).
To the dismay of some theorists and practitioners, democratic politics will never be exclusively civil. People will disagree, and they will disagree with strong emotions and in emotional language that reflects their identities and values. The goal of this book is to demonstrate that some—those who are more likely to approach conflict—continue to learn about and participate in politics even when it gets ugly. While there is constant tension between participatory and deliberative approaches to democracy, the conflict-approaching are better equipped to walk that tightrope. Meanwhile, the conflict-avoidant stand just outside the ring, discouraged and disillusioned by the toxicity of uncivil politics.
AMERICA’S “CIVILITY PROBLEM”
If the first step to overcoming a problem is to acknowledge you have one, American democracy should be well on its way to rehabilitation. Americans are not afraid to admit that they have a “civility problem”—that our political leaders and the mass public struggle to be polite or respectful to those with whom they disagree. Americans also prefer elected officials who stand their ground to those who choose compromise. In 2010, Lanny Davis, founder of the Civility Project and former White House counsel to President Clinton, commented that the level of vitriol was the worst he’d seen in his forty years in Washington (Karl and Simmons 2010). In a June 2017 PBS/NPR/Marist poll, 70 percent of respondents said they believe the overall tone and level of civility in Washington has gotten worse since Donald J. Trump was elected president (Taylor 2017). When pressed to allocate blame for increasing incivility, individuals point to both the politicians and the media (Weber Shandwick, KRC Research, and Powell Tate 2013).
Americans are quick to acknowledge that incivility is a nationwide problem, but most report that it has little effect on their own behavior. Public relations firm Weber Shandwick reports that Americans encounter some form of incivility about 10.6 times in an average week, or one to two times per day. Half of these experiences are offline, in “real life,” while the other half are online (Weber Shandwick, KRC Research, and Powell Tate 2018). While citizens acknowledge that incivility has become a daily part of their lives and are quick to point fingers at politicians and the media as the cause, only a quarter of respondents report that they have taken any action in response.
Incivility shapes Americans’ political behavior. But incivility does not affect everyone equally or in the same direction. Instead, its power depends on how an individual is predisposed to react to conflict—whether the person finds it exciting, uncomfortable, or so anxiety-inducing as to be avoided it at all costs. Psychological conflict orientation and political incivility shape our emotional reactions to media content and, ultimately, our decisions about political news consumption and engagement in political discussion and activities. From this perspective, the rise of incivility in political media—critical institutions that inform and motivate citizens—has transformed the nature of who gets involved by changing the resources needed to successfully engage with the style and structure of political discourse. Specifically, citizens must now regularly tolerate or even welcome incivility in the political sphere. Citizens with a conflict-approaching orientation, who enjoy conflict, can navigate political media and certain political activities in a way that their conflict-avoidant counterparts do not.
It has been well established that incivility, whether on television, in the comments section of a newspaper article, or over social media, has a range of good and ill effects on political behavior. Scholars have emphasized television’s unique visual perspective on politics, our tendency to react to what we see on screen as though we are experiencing it face to face, and the ease with which camera angles can be used to violate social norms for personal space (Mutz 2015; Reeves and Nass 1996). Each of these makes it easier for televised incivility to affect those watching—reducing their trust in government, their perceptions of its legitimacy, and their participation in it (Brooks and Geer 2007; Geer and Lau 2006; Kahn and Kenney 1999; Mutz and Reeves 2005).
The rise of the Internet made incivility’s presence even more explicit. The web offers a cloak of anonymity and limited constraints on citizens’ ability to express their opinions. These structural components of online discourse facilitate uncivil behavior to the point that scholars find considerably more uncivil behavior online than in face-to-face interactions (although not quite as much as on television or talk radio) (Chen 2017; Coe, Kenski, and Rains 2014; Papacharissi 2004; Sobeiraj and Berry 2011). Consequently, online incivility begets incivility—exposure to uncivil comments makes people more likely to critique the original poster or engage in flaming1—as well as polarization, closed-mindedness, and lower credibility for political news sites (Borah 2014; Gervais 2015; Hmielowski, Hutchens, and Cicchirillo 2014; Thorson, Vraga, and Ekdale 2010).
CONFLICT COMMUNICATION IN POLITICS
Political science is an inherently interdisciplinary field, and the subfields of political communication and political psychology are unabashedly so. Both disciplines are interested in the roots and results of political behavior, but with different antecedents. Political psychologists turn to cognitive and social patterns to explain behavior; political communication examines the causes and effects of media and interpersonal communication within the political sphere.
While political-communication scholars have been investigating the political effects of incivility, political psychologists have grown more interested in the role of individual differences and personality traits in influencing political behavior. These traits are “internal psychological structures that are relatively fixed and enduring, that are susceptible to observation, and that predict behavior” (Mondak et al. 2010, 85). Psychologists believe personality develops and crystalizes in youth, remaining relatively fixed throughout life. Research on personality and politics has focused on the core dispositional traits commonly referred to as the Big Five (e.g., Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak 2010) and midlevel individual differences that are thought to be products of dispositional traits and the environment, such as altruism (Fowler 2006; Jankowski 2015), racial resentment (Feldman and Huddy 2005; Kinder and Sanders 1996), and right-wing authoritarianism (e.g., Hetherington and Weiler 2009; Stenner 2005). Findings about the relationships between personality and political participation have been mixed, however, particularly for the Big Five traits. For example, in one sample, Mondak and Halperin (2008) found that agreeableness, a prosocial or communal orientation that can include traits like altruism, has a negative effect on voter turnout. However, this finding was not replicated in their second sample. They also found that agreeableness can lead to greater participation in certain types of local political participation, but not participation at the national level.
How can we reconcile these divergent findings? Mondak and his colleagues (2010) argue for a more complex framework for the relationship between personality, environment, and behavior. On the one hand, they argue, much media-effects research has focused on isolated homogeneous effects, such as the assumption that the media’s agenda-setting power influences the prioritization of political issues irrespective of the attributes of the citizens watching the news.2 On the other hand, political scientists can investigate situational, heterogeneous effects in which variations in people’s psychological predispositions lead them to respond differently to the same environmental stimuli. As Mondak et al. explain, “For both personality traits and environmental factors, we must detail in clear terms how and why effects on political behavior are expected to operate, and ultimately in what circumstances” (2010, 91). This book applies this framework to individual traits operating within a specific media environment. The uncivil political environment influences political behavior, but how and to what extent differs depending on the individual’s predisposition toward conflict. Put another way, conflict orientation can shape political behavior, but the expression of these effects differs across civil and uncivil media environments.
CONFLICT COMMUNICATION IN POLITICS
Harold Lasswell (1936) states that communication is about “who says what, to whom, in what channel, with what effect” and that “politics is who gets what, when, and how.” If both of these statements are true, then political communication is rife with conflict, as people seek to use an increasing range of interpersonal and mediated platforms to persuade others that resources should be distributed in their favor. Policy arguments are still made in the op-ed pages of newspapers, but they are also found in citizens’ tweets at congressional representatives and the back-and-forth discussion of guests and journalists on cable news channels. It is easier than ever for citizens to connect to political elites directly through social media and express their opinions about the allocation of political resources. The news media also make it easier for political elites to go head to head in making their public case for policies, programs, and political decisions. Political communication is frequently the communication of disagreement, of competing perspectives, and of conflict.
Yet we should not think of communication of political conflict on a one-dimensional scale. Political-conflict communication more accurately contains two dimensions: the degree of disagreement over substance, and the degree of incivility. As Brooks and Geer note, “some comments can, in fact, be quite critical of an opponent and still not earn a classification as ‘uncivil.’ Incivility requires going an extra step; that is, adding inflammatory comments that add little in the way of substance to the discussion” (2007, 5). While incivility can take many forms and definitions, I use it throughout this work to emphasize a particular tone—a continuum that ranges from the polite to insults to racial slurs and obscenities.
Political communication can vary in substantive disagreement and incivility simultaneously. For example, imagine that NBC’s Meet the Press invites Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Republican Mitch McConnell to discuss the government’s response to increased militarization in the Middle East. The two could agree on the substantive issue and solutions to the problem at hand (unlikely, in this case) or disagree. They could also convey their agreement or disagreement in more or less civil ways. It is one thing to say, “I do not think that sending troops is the most effective strategy,” and another to say, “You’re insane to think sending troops is a remotely effective strategy!” There is clear disagreement in both statements, but only the second approach is uncivil.
Figure 1.1 displays the two dimensions of conflict communication along a continuum demonstrating that individuals can be exposed to high or low levels of incivility and high or low levels of disagreement. Although the two components are portrayed here as orthogonal to one another, it is more likely that there is a relationship between them. As more contrasting perspectives are added, the conversation could take on a more uncivil tone3—these types of conversations would be clustered in the top right side of the figure. As figure 1.1 shows, contemporary cable news programming could be seen as high-incivility/high-disagreement communication. Similarly, those familiar with high school debate competitions or Robert’s Rules of Order that govern many legislative bodies can envision conversations in which there is a wide range of competing perspectives but minimal incivility. These examples of political communication would fall in the lower right quadrant. The more challenging types of conflict communication to imagine are those that minimize disagreement, only showing one perspective on an issue. However, a document like a press release is often written from a single point of view and in civil, respectful terms. We can turn to history for an example of communication that was high in incivility but low in disagreement. The partisan newspapers of the early 1800s presented only their own perspective on the day’s issues but did not hold back in their vehement expression of disgust and disdain for the other side (Ladd 2011; Schudson 1981). It’s not that these papers didn’t challenge the “other side”—they did, and vehemently. But unlike contemporary papers that emphasize “balance” between two or more sides, the partisan papers of yore presented only one perspective, much like a press release.
FIGURE 1.1 Dimensions and examples of communication conflict.
Conflict communication can be interpersonal, as in a high school debate or conversation with a friend, where two or more individuals express their personal opinions face to face. It can be mediated, when a viewer watches, reads, or listens to the disagreement and incivility of others. Considering all the ways in which discussion varies across dimensions of communication and conflict could fill volumes. Therefore, while I recognize the importance of substantive disagreement in shaping political behavior, my focus here is on a single dimension of communication conflict, incivility, as expressed in a single communication sphere, the mass media.
I emphasize incivility in the media for three primary reasons. First, the media are our primary source for learning about politics. Downs (1957) notes that the rational voter does not have the time to learn about every facet of government, and subsequent research on voting behavior demonstrates that, regardless of the cognitive processes by which people arrive at political decisions, the media are a well-worn path to political information (Campbell et al. 1980; Lau and Redlawsk 2006; Lupia 1994). Delli Carpini and Keeter add that “much of one’s observed knowledge about politics must come, at least initially, from the mass media” (1996, 185). People turn to the media to learn the details and tenor of the political climate, so it is important to understand how the media’s tone might influence citizens’ perceptions and decisions.
Second, research by Mutz and Martin (2001) suggests that citizens are exposed to the greatest amount of cross-cutting exposure—what I have been calling substantive disagreement—by watching and reading media. Disagreement is a given in the contemporary media environment. Americans expect political debate on important issues to include disagreement, and they expect to encounter this disagreement when they turn on the television or read an article. Disagreement, then, remains a constant in my empirical investigation, and we consider communication conflict in the form in which citizens are most likely to encounter it. When disagreement is constant across all of the experimental treatments, any media effects must be coming from the presence or absence of incivility, rather than from some interaction between incivility and disagreement.
Third, the media’s role as a source of disagreement opens it up as a likely source of uncivil messages. Indeed, we see that as general negativity increases in political ads and news coverage, so too does incivility. Sobieraj and Berry (2011) found that cable news programs, blog posts, and talk radio shows all had at least one “outrage incident”—the presence of one of thirteen different types of rude or uncivil behavior, such as mockery, misrepresentative exaggeration, insulting language, and name-calling. These types of language are manifestations of incivility that I argue are shaping citizens’ reactions to media across different media formats.
WHAT COUNTS AS UNCIVIL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION?
Political scientists typically view civil discourse as a normatively desirable characteristic of democratic government. Though they agree it is a normative good, they do not agree on what counts as civility. Civility has been defined in so many ways that it becomes difficult to parse out what it really means to be civil or uncivil. George Washington carried with him a list of “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior” that included maxims such as “use no reproachful language against anyone neither curse nor revile” (Washington 1988, 18). Washington’s rules are the mirror image of a more modern definition of incivility: “gratuitous asides that show a lack of respect and/or frustration with the opposition” (Mutz and Reeves 2005). Others see incivility as tied much more closely to democratic values and disregard for community, elected officials, and the truth (Jamieson and Hardy 2012; Maisel 2012). Still others see it as a function of those in power. The labeling of particular language or actions as civil or uncivil is a tool that can keep certain ideas and groups at the margins of society (Chafe 1980; Zerilli 2014). Washington’s definition facilitates the arrangement of discourse from completely civil—no reproachful language, to borrow his words—to completely uncivil: curses, revulsion, and more. The second definition conflates the tone and substance of the message, suggesting that someone who is polite but still derogatory toward a group or individual is being uncivil. The third conception emphasizes the extent to which incivility is a societal construct used to achieve strategic ends.
Each of these components—power dynamics, democratic commitment, and norms of etiquette or politeness—is integral to the architecture of incivility’s three-legged stool, and each has its benefits and its shortcomings for capturing the relationship between the concept and political behavior. Ignore that African Americans were accused of incivility by virtue of showing up and claiming rights, and the stool collapses. That being said, considering each component of incivility is too great an endeavor for a single book. Following the path laid out by many empirical scholars of incivility, I characterize the concept primarily as a function of the tone of communication.
Many definitions of incivility go beyond understanding it as simply impolite tone and language, tying the concept to more substantive articulations of disagreement and value-laden content that reflects shared civic and social norms. Communications scholar Zizi Papacharissi accepts this definition in her work, arguing that incivility requires “disrespect for the collective traditions of democracy” (2004, 267). She lists three ways for people to be labeled uncivil in their online commentary: verbalizing threats to democracy, assigning stereotypes, and threatening others’ rights. This definition effectively separates the concept from impoliteness but also complicates it. Now civility and incivility have a substantive component; they are not solely dependent on tone, and one can be uncivil while also remaining polite. In creating examples of this conception of incivility, one can imagine the “polite racist” who denies African Americans service in a restaurant or admission to a theater while using techniques of politeness—optimism, apology, reciprocity: “I’m really sorry, sir, but you understand that while we would like to help you, we cannot serve you here.” Polite expression can convey an antidemocratic, exclusionary message that denies civil and political rights.
Incivility can encompass substantive violation of democratic norms, but our ability to identify these violations also depends to some extent on the power dynamics in play. Chafe (1980) draws on the experience of African Americans in the Jim Crow South as an example of antidemocratic civility:
Blacks also understood the other side of civility—the deferential poses they had to strike in order to keep jobs, the chilling power of consensus to crush efforts to raise issues of racial justice. As victims of civility, blacks had long been forced to operate within an etiquette of race relationships that offered almost no room for collective self-assertion and independence. (8–9)
This portrait of race relations suggests that white citizens of Greensboro, North Carolina, were polite to their African American counterparts, but used that politeness to prevent them from gaining equal rights and access to services. If the discourse shifted toward increasingly vulgar language, however—racial epithets, insults to their intelligence—then the scenario would become uncivil as defined here.
I use the previous excerpt from Chafe to specify the confines of this book’s research enterprise. Many examples of specific language that ordinary observers deem civil or uncivil are politically important. Polite-sounding words can be deployed in politically oppressive ways. But because the expression is polite, such a message—as offensive and antidemocratic as it is—does not produce the same behavioral responses because it does not violate the norm of politeness in public discourse. Its rude, off-putting content is not matched in its tone, which, to the contrary, is perfectly polite. Citizens’ responses to uncivil political discourse are not driven primarily by this type of substantive incivility (Sydnor 2019), but by the tone and word choice.
For these reasons, I limit this book’s understanding of incivility to conceptual equivalence with impoliteness.4 I am interested in the effects of incivility independent from substance. This way, we might understand responses to discourse as occurring not because the conversation is negative, partisan, or demeaning toward an individual or group, but because it violates acceptable social norms for the tone of communication. Incivility manifests in the tone and style with which a speaker attacks someone’s “face,” or public self-image. Uncivil or impolite communication, therefore, is any statement that is not respectful of individuals’ desire to maintain their self-image, while polite and civil discourse suggests respect for others and their desires or needs (Brown and Levinson 1987; Culpeper 2011). For example, one could say it is either uncivil or impolite to use obscenities or character aspersions in conversation.
This focus on tone and word choice in identifying incivility aligns with our own perceptions of what constitutes uncivil communication and behavior. Two recent surveys asked Americans what constitutes incivility; more than three-quarters of respondents emphasized cursing, belittling, personal attacks, shouting, and interruption (Shea and Steadman 2010; Weber Shandwick, KRC Research, and Powell Tate 2013; “Allegheny Survey” 2016). Research by Huckfeldt and Sprague (1995) demonstrated that objective identification of conflict—in this case, substantive disagreement or cross-cutting exposure—matters less for behavioral outcomes than individuals’ perceptions of that conflict and its existence. By extension, any definition of incivility that helps us understand political responses should take into account what Americans think incivility is.
Incivility includes language that is consistently viewed as outside social norms—racial slurs and obscenity—but also less obvious aggressions, such as sarcasm and finger-pointing. These less dramatic discourteous gestures should also be considered an important part of conflict communication. These sorts of low-drama gestures are more socially acceptable—Joe Wilson would likely have received less press coverage if he had rolled his eyes or sighed during Barack Obama’s 2009 address to Congress instead of yelling, “You lie!” While the media’s tendency toward entertainment and sensationalism favors the more dramatic shouting, reactions like an eye roll, finger-pointing, or sarcastic comebacks are more likely to be included in everyday coverage and conversation. Citizens react to these minimal cues in much the same way they react to highly demeaning language, obscenity, and name-calling. We can therefore think of incivility as a continuum, with civil language on one end; moderately uncivil language and tone, such as sarcasm or eye-rolling, somewhere in the middle; and highly uncivil language, such racial slurs and obscenity, toward the other end.
The following list includes several examples of the types of language scholars have identified as uncivil. Many empirical tests of the effects of incivility on political behavior emphasize these elements of impolite tone in their operationalization of uncivil language.
MEASURES OF UNCIVIL TONE IN PREVIOUS STUDIES
| Investigators |
Measures That Capture Incivility |
| Mutz and Reeves (2005) |
Hyperbole, insults, exaggerated emotions, physical proximity, eye-rolling, finger-pointing |
| Brooks and Geer (2007) |
Inflammatory and superfluous language |
| Disbrow and Prentice (2009) |
Foul language, impoliteness, belittlement, nasty or derogatory comments |
| Thorson, Vraga, and Ekdale (2010) |
Derogatory terms and insulting language |
| Sobieraj and Berry (2011); Berry and Sobieraj (2014) |
Mockery, misrepresentative exaggeration, insulting language, name-calling, character assassination, slippery slope, emotional language, emotional display, obscenity, verbal fighting or sparring, conflagration, mockery/sarcasm, ideologically extremizing language |
| Coe, Kenski, and Rains (2014) |
Name-calling, aspersion, lying, vulgarity, pejoratives |
| Gervais (2014) |
Name-calling, mockery and character assassination, spin and misrepresentative exaggeration, histrionics |
| Hwang, Kim, and Huh (2014) |
Name-calling, contempt, and derision |
| Mutz (2015) |
Intolerance, impoliteness, physical closeness |
INCIVILITY’S PERSISTENT PRESENCE
Citizens are quick to spot conflict and incivility at the extremes of politics and in the midst of upheaval. Shea and Sproveri (2012) use the prevalence of references to “mean” and “nasty” politics in American history to suggest that writing about uncivil politics has varied greatly over the past two hundred years and that the peaks in these references occur in tandem with the “critical elections” proposed by many historians and political scientists (see, for example, Burnham 1970; Key 1955; Sundquist 1983). Geer (2012) notes that incivility in television news has increased in tandem with the use of negative advertisements by political campaigns. These historical observations raise the possibility that incivility is at its most prevalent when a fundamental economic or social issue is forcing the political parties to reconsider their platforms and make substantial changes to their policy stances. Beyond these critical elections, which have occurred relatively infrequently throughout American history, other forms of political upheaval and extremism facilitate the use of uncivil communication. History suggests we should not be surprised by shouting, character assassination, and other fighting words during times of political upheaval.
But citizens do not hear shouting and fighting words only during political turmoil. There are dozens of examples of politicians engaging in uncivil discourse in routine interactions with one another, from Alexander Hamilton describing John Adams as having “great and intrinsic defects in his character” (character assassination) to Representative Joe Wilson’s shout of “You lie!” during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress (shouting, accusations of lying; Grim 2009; Hamilton 1800). As with most political exchanges throughout history, Americans did not witness either of these comments or actions firsthand, but instead learned of them over the radio, in a newspaper, or through some other form of mass media. Incivility and impoliteness are most likely to arise from disagreement over substantive issues, and much media coverage of politics is focused on these disputes (Bennett 2002; Graber 2001; Patterson 2011). The focus on the horse race, the desire to get a catchy sound bite, and the need to pit opposing perspectives against one another ensure that the media serve as mirror and magnifying glass, reflecting the tenor of political discourse and augmenting the incivility that is already present.
Throughout American history, media coverage of politics has compounded political incivility. The partisan newspapers of the early 1800s were unabashed in their mockery and disdain for the opposition. These papers stuck to the party line, minimized the diversity of perspectives and disagreement present in their pages, and were quick to dismiss perspectives that did not align with their own in rude and confrontational ways. For example, one Civil War–era Wisconsin newspaper reported that “Mr. Lincoln is fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism” (Clayton 2012). The goal was to undermine the opponent by whatever means necessary, leading to media that were willing to privilege particular perspectives while denigrating their opponent through uncivil dialogue.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the press adopted a norm of journalistic independence and objectivity, advocating “principles and ideas rather than prejudices and partisanship” (Emery, Emery, and Roberts 2000). Different perspectives were encouraged, often in the same articles, but politicians and journalists still managed to interject the sensational and uncivil into the daily paper, particularly in the editorial section. Early media mogul William Randolph Hearst focused on the principles behind what he called the “Raw Deal” and wrote to his editors, “President [Roosevelt]’s taxation program is essentially Communism. It is, to be sure, a bastard product of Communism and demagogic democracy, a mongrel creation…evolved by a composite personality which might be labeled Stalin Delano Roosevelt” (Proctor 2007, 192). In the everyday discussion of policy and politics, incivility became a way to express dissatisfaction and disagreement with the establishment and the status quo.
The era of broadcast television and radio was the most likely of these three historical periods (early 1800s, early 1900s, and mid-1900s) to minimize incivility and maximize viewers’ exposure to diverse viewpoints, in part because of the Federal Communication Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, which was operative from 1949 to 2011. The doctrine was designed to ensure that all political discussion over the airwaves—so, all programming on network television and radio—did not exclude any particular point of view. Broadcasters were also required to alert individuals of personal attacks against them and give them a chance to respond (Federal Communications Commission 1949; Matthews 2011). Not only were media outlets trying to incorporate as many perspectives as they deemed necessary, they were also presenting that information in a relatively polite manner. As one writer for Fortune magazine noted in 1960, “American political debate is increasingly conducted in a bland, even-tempered atmosphere and extremists of any kind are becoming rare” (Seligman 1960). Incivility as a component of everyday media coverage has ebbed and flowed throughout history as norms and resources have changed.
The advent of cable news channels and the Internet has fragmented the media environment and encouraged a subset of outlets to return to the partisan perspectives common in the 1800s. The increasing number of news sources and the ease with which citizens can access them only reinforce the perception that incivility is increasing and the media are to blame. In the 2010 Allegheny College Survey of Civility and Compromise in American Politics, 48 percent of those surveyed said they believed civility had declined in contemporary politics, and more than half of these respondents pointed to radio talk shows and television news programs as playing a major role in the decline (Shea and Steadman 2010).5 Content analysis of “outrage incidents”—a set of characteristics that overlap with my understanding of incivility—in newspaper columns, talk radio, cable news, and Internet blogs, found that this type of discourse is more common in radio talk shows and cable television than in newspapers and blogs, with an average of twenty-three to twenty-four incidents per radio or television show compared to six per blog or newspaper column (Sobeiraj and Berry 2011). As the examples sprinkled throughout this chapter suggest, modern political coverage is rife with incivility in day-to-day political communication.
So, modern incivility is less distinctive than we might think. This variation in incivility across history shows that uncivil discourse can be an effective way to reach specific groups of followers (as was the case in the era of the partisan press) or to garner increased media coverage (as cable shows and Internet sites hurry to replay outrageous messages). No matter the era, certain types of media could be considered more disposed to publish incivility than others. In addition, each of these historical examples highlights the presence of “everyday” or “routine” incivility that is a part of political communication. None of the speakers referenced above are considered extremists presenting views outside the “acceptable” range of their time. Several of them, like Alexander Hamilton and William Randolph Hearst, were members of a core group of political elites using incivility not in an environment of protest and revolutionary action but in the course of regular political exchange with their peers.
The contemporary use of political incivility is not new, nor should we treat it as such. What is new is our ability to investigate American citizens’ responses to this “everyday” use of incivility in standard political communication. While it is impossible to go back and assess the personal characteristics of readers of the partisan press or muckraking journalism, enduring psychological constructs like the response to conflict likely led certain individuals to seek out those information sources in the same manner that people’s media choices today are shaped by their predispositions. Despite the enduring nature of these traits, little research has been done into how and why individuals respond to incivility. Incivility provokes different responses across individuals, and these differences can be attributed to one’s willingness to engage in confrontational or argumentative communication.
INDIVIDUALIZED INCIVILITY
Conflict communication is not expressed in a vacuum. When political elites debate one another on cable news shows or express their dissatisfaction with a policy decision on their Facebook accounts, citizens react. Some people will be drawn into the fray, while others will change the channel or scroll over a nasty post. In short, incivility in political media interacts with individuals’ predispositions toward conflict.
As individuals, we experience and respond to conflict in different ways. This conflict orientation, defined as one’s psychological experience of argument, confrontation, and disagreement, is a reaction to both dimensions of conflict. A person’s conflict orientation shapes how he or she feels when faced with someone who disagrees—regardless of whether the disagreement is expressed in a civil or uncivil manner. But, more important for this project, it also shapes how one feels in an environment with low disagreement but high or low incivility. The studies in the following chapters attempt to separate content from tone, varying incivility but not disagreement, to tease out the ways in which conflict orientation is a response to the tone of disagreement, rather than to disagreement itself.
For example, let’s return to the hypothetical discussion between Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell on Meet the Press. Both of the statements—“I do not think that sending troops is the most effective strategy” and “You’re insane to think sending troops is a remotely effective strategy!”—express disagreement, but the first does so in a civil manner while the other invokes uncivil language. We react differently to the first statement than to the second. However, while the political science literature suggests that citizens will have uniformly more negative responses to the uncivil statement, I argue that their responses will differ on the basis of their conflict orientation. Those people who have a negative reaction to conflict—who dislike argument and are uncomfortable when they witness fighting—will respond poorly to the uncivil version of the comment. They will feel anxious or disgusted by what they have just heard. However, those who enjoy conflict—who find argument exciting and are entertained by the couple across the restaurant who are shouting at one another—will feel amused and entertained by the same uncivil statement.
Incivility is an enduring component of political communication with implications for citizen behavior, affecting trust in government, perceptions of legitimacy, and participation. Previous research has predominantly assumed that incivility has homogeneous effects across individuals, but there are some indications that its impact depends on characteristics of the individual. Specifically, Mutz and Reeves (2005) found that the relationship between incivility and trust in government is moderated by an individual’s conflict orientation—one’s comfort when experiencing conflict in social settings. Mutz and Reeves experimentally manipulated the expression of incivility in a televised debate while attempting to hold the political content of the debate constant. In other words, they conceived of incivility in the same way that I do here: as a tone distinct from the political messages being conveyed. When they looked at the interaction of this experimental condition with individuals’ conflict avoidance, they found that people who have moderate to high levels of avoidance trust the government much less when exposed to incivility. However, those who are low in conflict avoidance report slightly higher levels of political trust in the uncivil condition than in the civil condition.
In her book In-Your-Face Politics, Mutz (2015) argues that incivility is particularly detrimental not only to Americans’ trust in government, but also to their respect for oppositional political viewpoints. This work touches on conflict orientation at several points, but the characteristic is not integrated into her theoretical argument. There are thus two primary differences between Mutz’s work and my own: my more rigorous exploration of conflict orientation as a psychological characteristic that influences political behavior, and my focus on engagement rather than attitudes. I argue that the interaction between incivility and conflict orientation extends to behavior beyond trust in government, influencing decisions about where to get one’s political news and how to get involved in political activities.
Why would conflict orientation shape our reactions to incivility? Conflict orientation is a stable personality trait that determines how one experiences and reacts to conflict (Bresnahan et al. 2009; Goldstein 1999; Testa, Hibbing, and Ritchie 2014). I will elaborate further on conflict orientation and the strategy for measuring it across individuals in the next chapter, but I stress here that it is about a person’s feelings when faced with conflict, rather than the explicit strategies he or she uses to resolve that conflict. When people are exposed to conflict in the form of incivility, their reactions will be colored by their conflict orientation.
As with incivility, we can think of conflict orientation as arrayed along a continuum. Some people have a very strong avoidance reaction to conflict; others are very willing to approach conflict; most fall somewhere in the middle, with a “conflict-ambivalent” response. When these individuals are placed in a high-conflict environment, they will react in different ways. Because people try to minimize their experience of negative emotions while repeating events that produce positive emotions, conflict will produce divergent responses across the range of conflict orientations (Cacioppo, Priester, and Berntson 1993; Fredrickson 2002). The conflict-avoidant will try to minimize the presence of incivility in their lives because it elicits negative emotions and reactions, while the conflict-approaching will create positive, enjoyable associations with conflict. In politics, attempts to minimize or emphasize exposure to incivility will manifest in behavioral choices—decisions about from which media to seek political information and in which political activities to participate.
Besides determining that emotional responses to stimuli affect behavior, psychologists have found that people want congruence between their personal predispositions and their environment and will take action to increase that congruence (Deutsch 1985). In the context of political participation, both affective response and the need for congruence serve as mechanisms by which the interaction between conflict orientation and incivility translate into different participatory habits for avoidant and approaching citizens. Those individuals who are conflict-avoidant will avoid activities in which they are more likely to be exposed to incivility or open themselves up to criticism from others: participating in protests, commenting on blogs, persuading others to vote, or working for a campaign, for example. Those who enjoy and embrace conflict—the conflict-approaching—will be more likely to participate in these sorts of activities. They will employ similar strategies when choosing which media they use to collect political information and how frequently they do so. The conflict-avoidant will turn to forms of media that citizens perceive as more civil, while the conflict-approaching will look to shows and sites that are willing to take a more impolite tone.
I expect these initial affective reactions to translate into differences in political behavior. Substantial research in political psychology has explored the connections between affect and political decisions, from vote choice to media attention to candidate evaluation (Brader 2006; Huddy, Feldman, and Cassese 2007; MacKuen et al. 2007). The buildup of these affective links—both positive and negative—between particular political activities, media platforms, and incivility leads conflict orientation to have an impact on individuals’ decisions to participate in certain political activities and to consume particular types of political media. Specifically, individuals who like conflict are more likely to participate in political activities in which they might have to express or defend their own opinions and to report greater preference for high-incivility media like blogs and cable television.
The current literature misses interesting and important heterogeneity in the affective and behavioral effects of political incivility, as these effects vary with the conflict orientation of the individual experiencing uncivil communication. These heterogeneous effects are important to the extent that incivility has the potential to mobilize those individuals who enjoy argument and disagreement—the conflict-approaching—while discouraging those who have a negative association with conflict from pursuing certain information sources or political activities. The fact that the conflict-approaching are more involved in certain elements of politics raises concerns about democratic equality—specifically given that the conflict-approaching are more likely to have additional political resources because of their demographic and social characteristics. Ultimately, the results presented in the following chapters demonstrate not only the ways in which individual psychological differences can affect people’s choices, but also an awareness of the broader political patterns that emerge from these individual reactions.
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In our ideal political world, everyone speaks kindly to one another, even when they disagree. In reality, you don’t have to go very far to find incivility in American political discourse these days—just open your web browser or tune in to cable news. While we work to move from the contemporary political experience toward that ideal, we also need to understand and reflect on the impact that incivility has on political discourse. Most importantly, we need to keep in mind that incivility is not all bad. For some people, the presence of incivility diminishes their democratic capacity: they react with more negative emotions, turn to entertainment over political news, and participate less in political discussions and activities. But for others, incivility provokes more positive emotional reactions, less biased information-search strategies, and more engagement in high-conflict political activities, whether offering their own opinions on political issues or persuading others to vote.
These two groups are divided by their conflict orientation, a psychological reaction to conflict in politics, sports, and daily life. Ultimately, conflict orientation can be considered a resource that—just like time, money, or facility speaking in public—facilitates our engagement with the political system. Those citizens who are comfortable with conflict have access to a wider range of sources of political information and means of political engagement because they are not turned off by the incivility that is a ubiquitous presence across many media outlets.
What is more, civility may not be the balm for mass democratic politics that some scholars might hope. While incivility brings the conflict-approaching into the political sphere, civility does not do the same for the conflict-avoidant. They experience negative emotions in the face of incivility, but they do not experience positive emotions when reading or watching a civil news story about the same topic. Civility is less entertaining and less memorable—key components in keeping Americans engaged with the political world.
This is not to say that politics should devolve into shouting, cruelty, and a resistance to compromise. A basic level of human kindness is essential to shared governance and collective decision-making. But incivility can be a necessary force of democratic accountability. While not universally and normatively positive, nasty language has a place in American politics. It can call attention to inequalities, discrimination, and opinions that are not heard in mainstream political discussion. It can draw in a set of people who enjoy and can engage with conflict, who then offer their own opinions and engage in democratic discussion of controversial issues. We need to practice civility while also helping conflict-avoidant citizens develop skills in and strategies for making their voices heard in the presence of uncivil political discourse.