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Paper abstract:

The paper investigates the relationship between media consumption and political views among citizens in Kazakhstan. Drawing on data from an opinion survey, the authors analyze how exposure to various media sources influences public attitudes towards the events that occurred in January 2022 ("Bloody January"). The study aims to shed light on the ways in which the media landscape in Kazakhstan shapes citizens' perspectives on political issues, and to contribute to our understanding of the factors that influence political polarization in the country.

The research contributes to the studies of political polarization in three aspects:

1. The prior studies have a strong shift of attention towards developed democracies. Despite, in the last years, a certain shift in research in favor of non-democratic regimes and/or the emergence of comparative studies, substantive body of literature is focused on western democratic societies, especially the United States; but these insights are not completely applicable, especially for non-democracies. The focus on Kazakhstan has a potential to make a modest contribution to overcome this limitation, bringing geographical and political diversity of empirical case.

2. Most studies in this field are traditionally centered on monolingual media environment, while multilingual societies do not receive enough attention. Yet states characterized by ethnic diversity and the presence of two or more competing languages are not uncommon and deserve more expertise. There is thus no reason why Western democracies with monolingual media environment should be given more analytical weight than, for instance, bilingual autocracy. Again, Kazakhstani case provides diversity of empirical case.

3. With some notable exceptions (e.g. Bail, 2021), studies of political polarization indeed conducted almost exclusively by scholars of economics and political science, who striving toward purely factual studies. This leads to significant progress in methodology of empirical research (e.g., identification of causal inference), but relatively poor development of theory. My goal is not so much to give the most accurate quantitative assessment of the impact of new media on political polarization, but to advance the conceptualization of new media effect on political polarization in the context of broader sociological concepts such as ethnic and class identity. The idea that media use is shaped by habits and preferences anchored in social context (that should be conceptualized in terms of social class and/or ethnic groups) seems obvious, but, surprisingly, does not receive much attention in the current research agenda. Thus, the proposed project would contribute to theory.