Today's elite political discourse is subject to widespread worries and criticism. These concerns generally depart from the notion that politicians violate communicative norms, which can potentially have severe democratic consequences. Oftentimes, normative conceptions of what political discourse should look like stem from theoretical, top-down, ideas of what is desirable. But what is citizens’ take on this? Especially in times of democratic disillusionment, having a thorough understanding of what citizens want and get from politics is paramount.
In the present study, we aim to shed light on this and ask: (1) Which communication norms are important to citizens?; (2) Are these norms perceived to be violated in today’s political communication environment?; (3) Do these perceptions differ for different citizens? For instance, do citizens who score high on populist attitudes, polarized attitudes, and political apathy care less?
Building on different literatures, nine manifestations of norms for mediated political discourse were selected (e.g., truthfulness, civility, understandability, providing justifications). Preliminary results from survey data collected in Belgium (N≈1560) point to a lower importance of "classic" norms (e.g., providing justifications), compared to norms related to accessibility (e.g., understandability). We find relatively high levels of perceived violation across the board. Moreover, these results differ across subgroups of people. For instance, citizens with more populist attitudes attach lower importance to norms and simultaneously evaluate political discourse more negatively. Further analyses will be conducted to deepen these insights and study potential underlying norm-dimensions. Findings will guide reflections upon the way (elite) discourse is studied and evaluated.