Recognition Crisis: Coming to Terms with Identity, Attention and Political Communication in the Twenty-First Century

ABSTRACT The theory of recognition has much to offer the field of political communication as it struggles to comprehend communicative dysfunctions, political polarization and governing crises across the industrialized democracies. Drawing on the work of Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Michele Lamont, as well as more recent contributions, we put recognition theory into conversation with some of our field’s contemporary concerns. In particular, we show how the theory offers depth, nuance and synthesis to progress communication scholars are making in the study of how attention economics and social identity shape perceptions and communications in a hybrid political media system. In the process, we argue that we are experiencing a historically novel phase of recognition, in which the granting and denial of recognition are transformed at the individual level by the affordances of many-to-many social networking platforms, and at the group level by the use of recognition for attracting attention to commodified media properties. At the intersection of the modern attention economy, heightened articulation of identity-based messaging, and recognition processes is what we term a recognition crisis, in which claims of misrecognition by multiple, conflictual groups are unresolvable and undermine the solidarity that grounds social and political life. We conclude with a roadmap of new opportunities to understand existing research findings and pose new research questions. Moreover, we show that the field of political communication has a great deal to offer discussions of recognition occurring in related fields of the social sciences.