Gendered democratic political participation on Facebook in a Danish context
Author(s): Vincent Gadegaard
Thursday 15 | 9:40-10:00
Room: TP55
Session: Sociality in the Digital Age: Interactions, Emotions, Lifestyles, and Norms
My PhD project explores the gendered differences in political talk on social media as it occurs during interactions in public political posts using a dataset containing almost full coverage of Facebook comments, likes, and replies by Danish citizens on posts by Danish politicians.
Previous research reveals consistent inequality in the amount and type of political engagement and deliberation that individuals engage with between genders in traditional political settings. Experimental research and surveys reveal an overall tendency for women to be less engaged with politics, feel and be seen as less authoritative in debate and generally participate less despite equal interest and political mobilization elsewhere. This suggests that social frames of political deliberation to some degree discourage women from participating in public political participation.
The project proposes that gendered differences in participation are maintained through differences in the situations and interaction participated in and the type of talk engaged with. In this view, digital space is a new and unique frame for interaction with distinct affordances and contexts that offers unique opportunities for understanding the changing landscape of political interaction that yet retain systematic gendered differences.
The project therefore employs digital trace data to enhance research into a generalizable qualitative understanding of interaction, by drawing on work by e.g. Goffman on talk and the interaction order, and Boltanski & Thevenots’ theory about the pragmatic use of regimes of justification, to analyze online political deliberation as consisting of different types of speech acts that are situationally mediated and interactionally embedded. These speech acts are in the digital context written utterances with differing rationales and intentions that can overlap and be used strategically in interaction to position oneself. One aspect of these is the justification order of utterances, which can include actions such as critique, support, demands, opinions, claims to validity, and more.
I will discuss how the interactional frame and digital affordances together with a sequence of speech acts by actors play together to create qualitative differences in the specific forms of talk individuals engage in - that tend to vary systematically with situation and generally differ between genders.
The focus of the first paper, and the main strokes of the presentation, will thus be how the digital frame as an interactional context has great implications on the type of situations and the talk that will occur, including the context and qualities of gendering talk within interaction. This also leads to reflections on how digital mediated contexts for political participation might shape the future of interaction, public and civil society in democratic societies.
Alongside this, as more political engagement by citizens move to digital contexts, adapting both concepts and methods to this is an important move for social sciences trying to understand the changing landscape of gender inequalities and participatory democracy in a digitized world.