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).