The main objective of this chapter is to compare the political discourses of Polish and Spanish citizens on science issues such as vaccines and climate change expressed by the citizens participating in the public consultations held in València (Spain) and Łódź (Poland) during the autumn of 2019. As the general elections were held very close to the public consultations in both countries, it was expected that there would be references to election campaigns, political parties, or public policymaking during the debates. Then, those statements explicitly expressing political views on climate change and vaccines were selected from the debate transcripts before applying five specific frames and variables for analysis and interpretation. The results show that more political opinions were expressed in the debates on climate change than on vaccines. Moreover, the citizens' views on the science-politics dichotomy mainly were negative, with the men mixing science with politics more than the women.
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Political discourse is omnipresent in all areas of the public sphere in democratic societies. It is fuelled both by positive and negative information circulating through numerous sources and channels. This is why it is difficult to remain aloof from the political statements and messages with which our societies are bombarded on a daily basis by the media, billboards, advertisements, social networking sites (hereinafter SNSs) and other dissemination platforms (Anderson, 2009; Luzón, 2013). In the early 1980s, Habermas (1981) was fairly critical of the involvement of the media in the public sphere, because he believed that they played a negative role, given that the communication industries always defended their own particular interests. Basically, he was of the mind that the media's power of propagation allowed its discourses to impact political and social life, alike. Therefore, he considered the media and its structures as fundamental powers that strongly influenced both. Since then, it seems that the influence of the media has declined to the point that they do not now play such an essential role in people's decision-making. On the contrary, international research suggests that, broadly speaking, personal information and SNSs exert the strongest influence in this respect (Entwistle et al., 2011; Álvarez el al., 2017; Campos & Kim, 2017; Martire & Helgeson 2017; Whitehead et al., 2018; Moreno-Castro et al., 2019; Urena, 2019).
In addition to the multiplicity of information channels, with the COVID-19 pandemic it has been confirmed that other aspects, such as the circulation of fake new, have since burst onto the scene (Bimber & Gil de Zúñiga, 2020). These information sources and channels are shaping an ecosystem characterised by an unstable post-public sphere, due to the multifaceted consolidation of the Internet era. According to Schlesinger (2020), this instability should come as no surprise since, over time, the conceptualisation of the foundations and scope of the public sphere has not ceased to change. Indeed, states are constantly developing rules to regulate the boundaries of their political systems. For his part, Davis (2020) calls it the anti-public sphere, defined as that space of online socio-political interaction in which the conversation routinely and radically mocks the ethical and rational norms of democratic discourse. This formerly offline space, which has recently gained visibility thanks to networked digital media, includes a large variety of discursive spaces and platforms, such as supremacist websites, anti-vaccination portals, climate change denial forums, anti-immigration Facebook pages, extremist websites and so forth. On these right-wing and 'truth' (conspiracy) websites, the conversation rides roughshod over the rules of public debate and argumentation (Żuk & Żuk, 2020).