Divergent Meanings of Politics - a Study of Social Representations in Swedish Twitter Conversations

Abstract

This article examines everyday thinking and common sense knowledge about the ontological meaning of ​politics. To map out patterns in such conceptions about politics the study analyzes Swedish political conversations on Twitter, an interactive social media platform where political news and issues – among other topics - are shared and discussed. Different meanings attached to politics in these conversations are analyzed within the framework of ​social representations ​ , a social psychological theory developed by Serge Moscovici. The findings illustrate that politics can be understood as idealistic, complicated, antagonistic, cynical and more or less separable/inseparable from other dimensions of our lives. An analysis of how these themes interplay in the conversations shows that some of these different meanings are conflicting, which points to politics as a dilemmatic phenomenon. The divergent conceptions about politics are suggested to bring different entries to - and ways of interacting with - political reality. The article further discusses the collective potential of clichés about politics. It also discusses how the adopted views on politics may be affected by the argumentative context in conversation. The study provides new insights into how social representations theory can be methodologically used to analyze communication about contradictory topics. Further research is recommended to clarify how the divergent understandings of politics are distributed, nationally or globally, among different social groups and to investigate what emotional characteristics the divergent views are linked to.