Incivility

Abstract

Incivility is considered a significant challenge for democratic discourse and has been the subject of many studies in a variety of contexts. Although political incivility has a long research tradition, and scholarly attention toward the phenomenon has increased with the advance of social media, there is academic controversy regarding the concept and normative implications of incivility in political contexts. This chapter provides an overview of different incivility approaches in the extant literature, discusses key challenges in incivility research, and outlines normative implications. Further, we suggest future directions for incivility research and argue why an integrative, multidimensional concept of incivility offers great potential for incivility research in the field of political (online) communication.