Research scrutinizing political talk online has been developed largely against the backdrop of deliberative discursive norms and considered political talk without a systematic analysis of surrounding mass-mediated discourses. By contrast, this study operationalizes counterpublic theory as an alternative theoretical perspective and analyzes comments on news websites as a reaction to hegemonic mainstream public spheres. It juxtaposes a qualitative framing analysis of all articles about a new anti-Euro party in devotedly pro-European Germany published on 9 news websites in the week following the 2013 elections (n = 22) with a content analysis of all comments posted below these articles (n = 3,154). It finds counterpublic spheres differently shaped in comment sections of right-and left-leaning, and tabloid and nontabloid, outlets. Consequences for democracy are discussed.

This study illustrates how the emphasis structure of counterpublic discourses surfacing online can be predicted by that of the dominant publics that these counterpublicsat the argumentative level-so resolutely oppose. Deploying a single common case study design, the article scrutinizes a counterpublic discourse that surfaced in the comment sections of Germany's opinion-leading news websites in the week after the surprising electoral success of a new anti-Euro party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Quantitative content analysis identifies 75% of all comments posted (N = 2955) to all articles about the AfD (N = 19) as part of an anti-Euro counterpublic. While this counterpublic sharply opposed the editorial lines of Germany's unanimously pro-common-currency media, it still aligned its efforts closely with this dominant public-albeit at a deeper level. As the findings demonstrate, the frequencies with which commenters adopted six emphasis frames were significantly predicted by the frequencies of these frames in mainstream news.

Against the backdrop of the current trend to criticise elite‐centred approaches to the study of nationalism, this article sheds light on ways in which elite and popular notions of nationhood are mediated. Thus, public discourse on national identity is explored as a discourse that ordinary people can influence and in which elites make claims to represent the people. To illustrate the dynamics of representative claim‐making and reception, the article uses a case study from German public discourse; the debate about Thilo Sarrazin's 2010 book Germany Does Away With Itself. It finds that, although Sarrazin clearly breaches well‐established rules in national identity discourse, his ideas gain traction from the moment he becomes accepted as representing ordinary Germans. The findings are discussed against the backdrop of the history of German national identity discourse and anti‐essentialist approaches treating nationhood as a political claim.

This article argues that mass-mediated public discourse produces a discourse on emotion and disseminates specific feeling rules for different groups of people by studying one of the most heated debates on immigrant integration in Germany during the past decade – that surrounding Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Does Itself In. Adapting and further developing Arlie Hochschild’s notion of feeling rules as a ‘sensitising concept’ within a grounded theory approach, it analyses 427 statements about ordinary Germans’ emotions, which were drawn from a corpus of 961 newspaper articles, letters to the editor and other items. The article shows that the debate’s discourse on emotion assigned different sets of emotions to two different groups of ordinary Germans: ‘Autochthonous Germans’ were predominantly described as having Angst (German for anxiety), while ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ were partly described as being offended or hurt. It also conveyed different sets of feeling rules for each of them. While ‘autochthonous Germans’ were generally not asked to control their Angst, there was a tendency to ask ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ to hold back their feelings. The article interprets this pattern as an unequal distribution of recognition and discusses how future research may benefit from the approach presented here.

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