New trends or old habits? Stability and changes in political styles in European democracies since 1960

Hardly a week goes by without reports of elected officials—often depicted as ‘populists’—having used
vitriolic language and viciously attacked their opponents. In a context of ‘restyling of politics’, the style
of political actors is presented as increasingly emotional and confrontational. Some scholars have
argued that these styles directly challenge the democratic functioning of our modern societies. Yet, in
the absence of longitudinal studies, such claims remain trivial intuitions and anecdotes that are as old
as politics. Do the styles of modern politicians constitute new trends or reflect old habits? What are
the factors constraining or favouring certain styles? In the face of a form of nostalgia for good old
times, I critically challenge the idea that emotive and confrontational styles are necessarily threats in
contemporary democracies. Instead, I posit that the challenges that some styles posited to democracy
is the fact that such styles have increasingly targeted groups, in their private traits and personal life.
This change has occurred at the expense of the substance that focused on political issues and policy
orientation. While ‘politics is all about conflicts’, the real democratic threats concern ‘group conflicts
without politics’. This contribution will present the POLSTYLE project and how it intends to make
empirical, methodological and theoretical breakthroughs by analysing the evolution of political styles
in four European democracies since the 1960s, studying performance of actors’ style in distinct arenas
(TV, print press, Parliamentary debates and Twitter).