Measuring Agonism and Deliberation Across Social and Traditional Media News: Evidence from Cultural Memory Debates

This presentation introduces a comparative framework for measuring agonistic and deliberative dynamics in contested public debates on cultural memory. Building on theories of agonistic democracy and deliberative democracy, and drawing on evaluative models based on DQI indicators, we present a customised methodology for assessing, measuring, and comparing levels of agonism and deliberation across social media (X) and traditional media. The framework uses media-specific operationalisations tailored to the communicative logics of each arena and is developed and tested on debates over collective memory and competing historical interpretations. We apply Greimas’s narrative analysis to identify Subject–Object–Opponent narrative triads and code the opponent’s political orientation (as a proxy for left–centre–right narrative positioning), enabling us to identify the most common narrative structures in the agonism clusters.

We present results from applying the framework to analyses at the national, cross-border, and transnational levels, with a particular focus on discussions of Giorno del ricordo (10 February), which I one of the most polarising commemorative events in Italy and the Italo-Slovenian borderland. The case illustrates how antagonistic escalation, agonistic engagement, and deliberative potential coexist across media environments, and how computational measures can help identify where dialogue-oriented openings nevertheless emerge within highly polarised memory conflicts.