Different Standards: Observing Variation in Citizens’ Respect-Based Norms for Mediated Political Communication

Incivility, oversimplification, lying, inaccessible language: there is widespread concern and controversy about the disrespectful ways politicians communicate. The reasoning underlying these worries is that such communication violates widely shared communicative norms, and that exposure to it may lead to adverse consequences in the wider public. However, widespread support for respect-based norms among citizens is generally presupposed, and little is known about the extent to which norm support matters in how people react when witnessing disrespectful politicians. Using Belgian survey data (N = 2,030), we investigate whether citizens differ in the degree to which they support different respect-based norms for mediated elite communication, and whether differing levels of norm support moderate the relationship between perceived norm violations and several political outcomes (affect toward politicians; political trust; talking about politics; political information seeking). The results reveal substantial variation in norm support across the population, with differences based on sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., education level) and political attitudes (cynical, populist, polarized attitudes). This variation, moreover, matters. While depending on the outcome and norms we study, several findings show that citizens supporting respect-based norms react more negatively when perceiving norm violations more frequently, as compared to citizens caring less about these norms. Yet, whether and in what way this moderating effect occurs can differ for different types of disrespect. As such, besides showing that respectful communication is not equally important to everyone and that not everyone reacts to norm breaking in the same way, this study also underlines that not all shades of disrespect should be tarred with the same brush.