Online battles Conflict frames in political actors' online communication: Context, content, and consequences

In today's digitalized media landscape, political parties and politicians frequently use social media to communicate with the public. In doing so, they often use conflict frames - emphasizing opposition, attacking opponents, and contrasting their agendas with competitors - to capture the audience’s interest. This dissertation investigates how and why Dutch politicians use conflict frames, what types of conflict frames can be identified, and how these different types of conflict frames affect citizens and democracy. The dissertation proposes using a multidimensional framework of political conflict frames to investigate what types of conflicts are desirable in a democracy. The framework consists of four dimensions: (1) whether the conflict is uncivil or civil, (2) substantive or personal, (3) whether it is about underlying moral/epistemic principles or not (deep versus ordinary); and (4) whether it concerns a normative or factual issue. An examination of the use and effects of these four dimensions shows that politicians predominantly use civil, substantive, ordinary, and normative conflict frames and that most online conflicts do not affect citizens’ attitudes toward politics. However, the findings did show that under specific conditions, such as when conflicts are uncivil and concern factual issues, they can negatively affect political attitudes or behaviours. The proposed framework of conflict frames offers a forward-looking perspective for understanding the role of conflict frames in our in the contemporary information ecology.