Honors Theses
Date of Award
2010
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Richard Forgette
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
The Internet, as an unregulated and anonymous outlet, sometimes fosters uncivil political interaction, in which political debates escalate to hate speech or attacks on a social group. There is much debate on whether the political blogosphere will foster a purer democracy or create a more politically polarized society. In order to make conclusions about the societal effects of uncivil political dialogue, I examined the effects of Inflammatory political language on readers of weblogs and other online posts. I created and distributed five versions of an online survey, with each survey containing a different version of mock political blog comments. Each survey contains either conservative, inflammatory conservative, liberal, or inflammatory liberal political commentary — along with a control version that did not contain any blog comments. The results from the 283 survey participants showed that political commentary containing inflammatory language is not significantly more persuasive or polarizing than commentary without inflammatory language.
Recommended Citation
Hosford, Holly Sarah, "The Polarizing Effects of Inflammatory Language in Political Blogs" (2010). Honors Theses. 2350.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/2350
Accessibility Status
Searchable text