Yosley Carrero Chávez
Thesis title (PhD)
AFFECTIVE POLARISATION THROUGH ONE-PARTY STATES: THE CUBAN CASE STUDY
My research will explore the extent to which political Facebook use drives affective polarisation among Cubans. In this regard, a large number of studies have described their concern about increasing political polarisation dividing societies into “us versus them” in different contexts ranging from the two-party U.S. system to multiparty European and Latin American systems (Iyengar et al., 2012; Hobolt, Leeper & Tilley, 2021, McCoy et al., 2022; Sarsfield & Abuchanab, 2024). However, affective polarisation research in one-party states has received little academic attention.
I argue that in the context of one-party states, social media are not only platforms for the study of the democratisation of the public sphere but fieldwork to examine affective polarisation among individuals. I posit that affective polarisation is context-related, hence the methodological designs to approach the phenomenon in one-party states should not be acritically imported from other contexts but need to consider the specificities of political systems, instead.
As polarisation journey abroad from home to host countries (Sinanoglu & Kepenek, 2021) and diaspora members engage in transnational conversations on Facebook to discuss political issues and challenge authorities back home (Ansar & Maitra, 2024) and social media communication trespasses nation-state borders, I outline the transnational nature of affective polarisation within the context I study.
Although the literature on affective polarisation has long been dominated by the quantitative paradigm (Gharib & Boler, 2021) with survey instruments as the main measurement tools (Iyengar et al., 2019), I argue that qualitative research methods are not only necessary but indispensable to explore why people become affectively polarised, how they make sense of the experience and what the material implications of affective polarisation on political and non-political settings are.
Drawing from Discourse Analysis Theory, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and an online survey, I will use a mixed method approach or qualitative-quantitative methodology (Feilzer, 2010; Creswell & Poth, 2018). Combining qualitative and quantitative research, I will add meaning to numbers and numbers to add precision to words (Dornyei, 2007) to better understand reality (Greene, 2007).
Publications
Yosley Carrero Chavez, ‘Fashionable Destination? The Making of Cuba as a Business Opportunity and Tourist Destination in U.S. Online Media’, Reuters Institute Fellows’ Papers (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford), 2017. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/fashionable-destination-making-cuba-business-opportunity-and-tourist-destination-us.