“Libernyákok” and “O1G”. Incivility in political communication
Libernyákok és O1G. Modortalanság a politikai kommunikációban

Summary/Abstract: Obscenity, vulgarity and rude languages are always being the part of the political life, but nowadays the visibility of incivility is increasing in Hungary. However, the introduction of these topics needs to be recognized by the academia as legitimate research agenda in political communication studies. This article presents a topic review to summarize the state-of-the-art and offer new theoretical and empirical perspectives of incivility. We argue that the main branch of the literature consider incivility as a violation of social and political norms. Our critical overview highlights several weaknesses of the norm violation approach. First, we lack the substantive definition of the incivility. Second, we question the normativity: on what basis a researcher defi ne what counts as uncivil political communication and what does not?; who sets the discursive norms in the commentary platforms?, what if the labeled words and expressions are not perceived uncivil by the users?. To give new impetus to incivility studies, this article works toward a practice-oriented multimodal approach which focus on the verbal and visual usage of communication toolkit in politics. Finally, the article outlines three directions for future research: consideration of psychological aspects, strategic uses and sociolinguistic practices of incivility.

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