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.

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