EXC 2060 B3-46 - Analyzing the Communication of Religiously Framed Threats

A broad literature in political science and psychology has shown that the perception of (religiously connoted) threats is substantially linked to relevant social and political attitudes in the population. For example, perceived threats, particularly towards Muslims in Western Europe, are linked to support for right-wing populist parties, dislike of international organizations and mistrust of democratic institutions. However, there is a lack of research when it coms to the causes and conditions of this correlation, particularly with regard to the influence of political and media communication. Although it is repeatedly assumed that the communication of primarily culturally and religiously framed threats by political and social actors such as right-wing populist parties increases threat perceptions and / or makes them more relevant for the population, there are no convincing findings to date (A) for the extent of communication of religiously and culturally framed threats and thus not (B) for their effects on the population.

In our project, we primarily want to address the research gap (A) in order to lay a foundation for solving the research gap (B). In the project, we will (1) develop a combination of different automated content analysis methods to systematically assess the degree of - religiously connoted - threat communication in different text forms. We will (2) triangulate these automated methods through a citizen science module by comparing manually collected degrees of threat perceptions with the automatically collected degrees and thereby improve the automated measurement. In the dominant content-related part of the project, we will (3) analyze the proportion of religiously connoted threats in the overall threat communication.