VOTA LISBOA: Exploring fragmentation and Polarization through Digital Media: Portugal citizens’ perceptions on political communication strategies and informed vote - Handbook

This report is the result of the project VOTA LISBOA. Exploring fragmentation and Polarization through Digital Media: the case of Portugal citizens and their perceptions on political communication strategies, which is part of the Transdisciplinary Field Research Training 2023: Fragmentation of Society & Resilience, a component of the MSc in Transition, Innovation, and Sustainability Environments (TISE Program), under the supervision of Professors Dr Marisa Torres da Silva and Dr Jorge Martins Rosa. The overall objective of the project is to implement a transdisciplinary approach to identify the threats of polarization through social network sites considering the involvement of affected communities and opportunities to counteract its effects in collaboration with citizens as stakeholders. As a result, we created Vota Lisboa, a creative participative process in which citizens in Portugal had the opportunity to engage in activities and conversation around the political communicative strategies deployed by the current Portuguese political parties, before and after the elections of March 10th 2024. In order to design the activities mentioned, we researched the current political context through journalistic sources and social media content. We developed a stakeholders map and identified as relevant issues the far right use of digital media, the initiatives that serve as a counternarrative to it, and important insights from the institutional field. Taking into account that context, we defined as a vulnerability space the lack of awareness of populist political communication strategies. Based on the aim of gaining socially robust solutions and collaborative systemic perspective we designed a participatory workshop in order to better answer the following guiding question: which are the current political communication strategies being used by Portuguese political parties in social network sites and how could this affect an informed vote within the citizens of Lisboa? The structure of the mentioned workshop is as follows: 1) a synchronous meeting in which we and the stakeholders meet online to discuss based on the activities we designed, and 2) an asynchronous activity in which the stakeholders face hypothetical future scenarios to play with. These two activities were designed to thrive towards an informed voting process and a more engaging environment in which politics are placed into the conversation table. Additionally, the first activity and its results nurtured the second one, since we wanted to plan and think around the topic continuously, treating the project as a living creature. From the condensed results of both moments, as well as from the process of getting to them, we draw some reflections and proposals which can be found in the section “Reflections and Proposals” at the end of this report. The main proposal is the potentiality of Vota Lisboa as an incubator of ideas to strengthen an informed and conscious political participation of citizens. Therefore, we have included as resources a toolkit and a glossary , that will allow the reproduction of this initiative. A toolkit and a glossary to the project can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1svQ_-xXHdurMkwZQWONQu3kTg_pJpNL-?usp=share_link