Four Country - Sustained Political Dialogue Study Strategies and Recommendations

The OppAttune project aims to track, attune, and limit the spread of Everyday Extremism, which is when a person engages in symbolic violence and/or limits someone’s capacity for democratic engagement via words or images in on-line and off-line contexts. This deliverable focuses on exploring how individuals can sustain dialogue on challenging political issues to understand how the public can develop their democratic capacities. That is to say, garner insights into how the public can talk to those with whom they disagree without resorting to personal attacks. To explore if they can move away from the ‘us vs them’ dynamic of a politically extreme worldview into one which recognises and understands different views (i.e.: become comfortable with oppositional narratives). Therefore contributing to WP6’s intention to understand the psychological drivers behind extreme narratives and how they manifest in communication. The insights from this Four Country Sustained Political Dialogue Study has also been used to develop an attunement tool intervention for frontline practitioners to contribute to the project’s aim of limiting everyday extremism.

This research consists of a two-step process (1) Study A: One to one stimulus-led interviews which explore participant’s positions on migration and offer a context for pairing participants together, and (2) Study B: Paired discussions in which the same participants are paired together based on shared positions on migration and a potentially polarising issue. This research builds on outputs from the WiDE Lens Survey (D 6.2) and its insights into the drivers of everyday extremism by adopting two of the measures used by the survey to understand how migration-mobility experiences and worldviews are valuable in contextualising political views on migration (see sections 2.1 & 2.4). Based on methods and theories from previous research (English, 2022; English & Mahendran, 2021; Gillespie and Martin, 2014; Silvia, Fernández-Navarro, Gonçalves, Rosa, & Silvia, 2020), this study aims to offer insights into how individuals could sustain dialogue during polarised interactions to contribute towards the Political Attunement Model (D6.5).