This study explores politicians' subjective views of the mediatisation of politics and the implication it has for their satisfaction with democracy. Based on previous research, we hypothesise a negative effect of their perception of media influence on their evaluation of the news media's performance as a public informant. These perceptions directly and indirectly influence politicians' satisfaction with democracy. The relationships were tested with a Structural Equation Model (SEM) based on comparative survey data from politicians in seven democracies (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland). Results show that a strong influence runs from politicians' perception of the media's performance as regards public information to their satisfaction with the functioning of democracy. This influence is stable across countries. The SEM thus may provide a good explanation for why some politicians attack legacy media and excessively use social media to communicate with voters. Results also point to risks of media-driven democracies.

This research provides critical, comparative insights into the public communication responses employed by Australia and New Zealand during the first twelve months following the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. The two nations share a similar socio-political and cultural context, but despite being highlighted by the international media as early success stories, their public communication responses to the pandemic showed noteworthy differences. Borrowing from cultural studies, this paper applies the circuit of culture model and offers a snapshot in time that reinforces the importance of socio-cultural awareness when communicating intricate and challenging information. It supports the idea that a range of effective solutions to complex communication challenges are possible and may result in a similar outcome, including strengthened identities and national pride during uncertain times.

This work examines how the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the migration debate on Twitter. Through co-hashtag network analysis, time-frequency and content analysis, it shows that the pandemic was related with positive (humanitarian) and negative (threat) stances about migration. The positive side focused on the need to protect refugees stranded at camps in Greece from COVID-19. The negative focused on the Greek-Turkish land-border crisis (Evros crisis), using COVID-19 to reinforce migrants as racialized others. These findings fit the problematization of positive and negative migrant representations in the Global north as Eurocentric. In the case of camps, refugees fit well within the victim/helpless frame, justifying humanitarianism, this time on health grounds. Regarding the border crisis, refugees also fit the Eurocentric frame of violent/male/inferior other who could spread a deadly virus. Overall, COVID-19 intertwined with migration in Twitter debates, reinforcing the racialized, Eurocentric representational field on migrants from the Global south.

Politicising the smartphone pocket archives and experiences of 16 young refugees living in the Netherlands, this explorative study re-conceptualises and empirically grounds communication rights. The focus is on the usage of social media among young refugees, who operate from the margins of society, human rights discourse and technology. I focus on digital performativity as a means to address unjust communicative power relations and human right violations. Methodologically, I draw on empirical data gathered through a mixed-methods, participatory action fieldwork research approach. The empirical section details how digital practices may invoke human right ideals including the human right to self-determination, the right to self-expression, the right to information, the right to family life and the right to cultural identity. The digital performativity of communication rights becomes meaningful when fundamentally situated within hierarchical and intersectional power relations of gender, race, nationality among others, and as inherently related to material conditions and other basic human rights including access to shelter, food, well-being and education.