This project aims at elucidating a fundamental if somewhat neglected context for democratic governance, namely the role of mediated public communication in processing political conflict in Western democracies. Mediated contestation is a core element of modern democracy and features prominently in most contemporary theories of democracy. The concept comprises all forms of communicative political conflict that are a) discussed in mediated public communication or b) for which mediated public communication is directly used by conflict parties (organizational or individual media activity such as blogging etc.). The project will study the extent, structure and style of mediated contestation in six democra- cies. It will investigate how these patterns of mediated contestation vary in dependence on three groups of attributes of national contexts, on the one hand, and media, on the other: (a) the nature of the political system (majoritarian versus consensus), (b) the existence of a deep cultural division (contested versus uncontested secularism) and (c) the type of media forum (traditional versus new, and general news versus opinion media). The features of mediated contestation are captured through a combination of automated and human-coding variants of quantitative media content analysis.
