Politics is rife with conflict, because groups differing in power collectively decide who gets what. But levels of conflict in those processes vary greatly, as do manifestations of that conflict in communication. Disagreement often spills over into uncivil tones—including name-calling, insults, obscenities, and finger-pointing—and our contentious politics feels more uncivil by the day. How do variations in political incivility shape who dives into politics and who is inclined to stay out of the fray?
Emily Sydnor’s Disrespectful Democracy provides persuasive answers to these questions that hinge on interactions between messages and audience traits. Most crucially, she shows that the democratic implications of incivility vary dramatically depending on citizens’ orientations toward conflict in everyday life, in ways that attract some citizens while repelling others. Her refreshing argument touts conflict tolerance as a key (but unequally distributed) resource for citizens. “Citizens with a conflict-approaching orientation, who enjoy conflict, can navigate political media and certain political activities in a way their conflict-avoiding counterparts do not,” she writes (p. 6). Sydnor also recognizes that incivility’s normative hue depends on its context. She leverages surveys, experiments, content analysis, and engaging illustrations to document uncivil content differences and then investigates their consequences for mass political engagement, participation, and news consumption.
Sydnor begins by showing that the stable tendency to approach or avoid interpersonal conflict differs across individuals, and she finds that a conflict-approaching orientation is lower (on average) among more educated people, women, and racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, differences in conflict traits map unevenly across groups, with more conflict avoidance among groups that have been historically excluded from power. Sydnor’s surveys also indicate more interest in politics among conflict-approaching individuals.
Next, Sydnor reports results from two experiments with real video clips—civil and uncivil—drawn from politics and entertainment. Incivility evokes positive or negative emotional reactions in citizens depending on their conflict orientation. Conflict-avoiding people feel more anger, anxiety, and disgust in response to incivility, whereas conflict-approaching people report more amusement and entertainment.
The book’s content analysis shows that political news sources vary in levels of incivility and conflict. That raises the potential for selective exposure among audiences and real differences in the amount of conflict exposure given that choice. Sydnor finds substantially more uncivil language in partisan cable news (~80% of segments) compared to CNN (68%), while network news segments were much lower than both types (~ 50%). Internet news and talk radio fall on the high-conflict side, whereas newspapers and social media are generally lower in conflict (despite the latter’s harsher reputation).
Sydnor then shows how conflict orientation guides political news choices and information-seeking across these news sources. Her surveys indicate substantial net differences in news consumption by conflict orientation for internet and radio news as high-conflict sources, along with lower levels of overall news consumption and a preference for network TV news among conflict-avoiding people. (Those net differences seem to work through differences in political interest that correspond with the conflict orientation.) Sydnor’s results provide more evidence that news outlets value conflict to attract audiences, although that audience-building strategy has limits that depend on personality traits. Despite the aversion that incivility causes in conflict-avoidant people, Sydnor paradoxically finds that they seek out and consume more uncivil content when exposed to it, like other anxiety-producing spectacles we cannot look away from. In contrast, conflict-seeking people in the experiments subsequently chose to watch less uncivil content.
The final empirical chapter—and arguably the most important one in the book—presents the conditional consequences of incivility on political participation and expression. Some types of political participation expose people to more conflict than others. Sydnor finds conflict-approaching traits correspond with higher political participation in high-conflict activities like online commenting, persuading others, and protest. Conflict-approaching individuals are substantially likelier to use incivility themselves, but that tendency is multiplied when they are exposed to uncivil messages in Sydnor’s experiments, similar to other recent studies in which norm-breaking communication encourages more of the same.
The book concludes with a constructive discussion of how to partially close political engagement and participation gaps among citizens averse to conflict. Sydnor recommends teaching conflict-averse citizens how to better manage the negative emotions associated with political conflict and encourages efforts to work through those emotions with political practice.
The book’s biggest contribution comes from expanding the scope of incivility effects to include political engagement, participation, and news consumption. Readers familiar with Diana Mutz’s (In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media, 2015) research on televised incivility will appreciate Sydnor’s participatory extension beyond Mutz’s tests on political trust, candidate evaluation, and views of political opposition. The books complement each other well.
Disrespectful Democracy is particularly adept at clarifying the underlying psychology of incivility effects. Sydnor focuses on the mediating role of emotions in politics and highlights the importance of personality traits applied in everyday interpersonal life that similarly guide citizens when they happen to encounter politics (or try to avoid it). In doing so, the book reaffirms the value of modeling interactions between political contexts and individual-level traits that guide political behavior. Put differently, mass politics occasionally calls dynamics from everyday interactions into the political domain, rather than drawing out some alternative form of interpretation, reasoning, and action. Sydnor finds similar audience reactions to uncivil entertainment and politics, which reinforces that view.
Trait-based conflict reactions and their unevenness across social groups drive home broader implications for democratic practice. Sydnor also adds evidence on conflicted politics in the new media realm, including observational evidence of news-seeking in the new media environment with internet, social media, and partisan news joining the fray.
Sydnor’s view of conflict orientation as a resource also resonates with Davin Phoenix’s (The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics, 2019) representation of the racial anger gap in politics and the conditional mobilizing role of that emotion in black political participation. Sydnor’s findings on racial differences in conflict orientation and its unique role in protest participation speak to Phoenix’s analysis of anger inhibition among black folks (due to whites policing those expressions) and his evidence that anger among black citizens tends to mobilize extra-systemic participation like protest, while enthusiasm mobilizes systemic acts like voting. Both books are attentive to the implications of these emotion-related gaps for political equality.
From a normative perspective, Disrespectful Democracy is refreshingly sanguine about incivility (in some forms), much more so than most scholarly works and mainstream political commentary. Sydnor, however, is careful to note what conditions must apply and to acknowledge its harms. Much of the distinction, she says, rests in power—whether incivility is used by the powerful to demean (or police) the disempowered or by the disempowered to challenge and call attention to the obscene actions of the powerful. A blanket rejection of incivility and a uniformly civil discourse will not solve our problems, she argues.
Disrespectful Democracy is well suited for undergraduate and graduate teaching and research in American political behavior and mass communication, and it is written engagingly for general interest readers too. Sydnor succeeds in illuminating the uneven consequences of political conflict on citizens’ involvement in American democracy at a time when conflict in politics feels like it has reached a fever pitch. Yet she also challenges us to think differently about conflict and incivility while proposing ways for practitioners to reduce participatory inequities that arise when politics becomes more contentious.
