This project analyses political polarization through a political communication lens. It develops a multimedia and multi-actor research framework to study the forms that political polarization can take within contemporary hybrid media systems – wherein multiple actors, older and newer media platforms, formats, and logics converge and compete– as well as its implications for democratic systems. Its proposed approach is applied to and tested through the investigation of the Italian case, which is analysed through an innovative and multi-method approach to study, first independently and then in conjunction: i) mass polarization, i.e., how citizens’ media diets, citizenship styles, positions on specific political issues combine and thus may take their political preferences at the extremes; ii) elite polarization, i.e., how political actors’ media discourse is polarized and what implications this can have for the whole party system, for the formation of coalitions, and within single parties; iii) the relationships between professional journalism and political polarization, to understand whether and how news media strengthen polarized representations of reality and which factors, for news media and journalists, determine these representations.