Dominik Stecula

The Ohio State University | OSU · School of Communication

Climate-facilitated spread of mosquito-borne pathogens to new environments elevates the importance of policies that limit greenhouse gas emissions as well as the development and uptake of new pharmaceutical interventions. Whereas past research attempts to bolster support for both through either climate or health risk communication, fewer attempt to...

A key barrier to ensuring the growth of the housing supply is local opposition to development, often called NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). We use pre-registered studies on representative samples of Canadians and Americans to explore the values-based correlates of opposition to local housing development, as well as opposition to public policies des...

Background. A highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza (H5N1, or “bird flu”) began circulating across poultry farms worldwide in 2020. While the virus has been transmitted to mammals and humans in the past, media attention to the potential impact of H5N1 on human health following the documentation of unprecedented transmission between mammals in...

Conventional wisdom surrounding President Joe Biden’s unprecedented decision to exit the 2024 Presidential race suggests that he came to view his would-be nomination as detrimental for the Democratic Party; both with respect to turnout, as well as the success of “down-ballot” candidates for federal and state-wide office. Whether or not conventional...

While Prospect Theory helps to explain decision-making under risk, studies often base frames on hypothetical events and fail to acknowledge that many individuals lack the ability and motivation to engage in complex thinking. We use an original survey of US adults (N = 2813) to test Prospect Theory in the context of the May 2023 debt ceiling negotia...

Pundits and scholars alike suspect that Facebook plays a role in not only exposing Americans to misinformation, but also encouraging them to seek out misinformation from other sources. Whether or not Facebook is responsible for stimulating misinformation search beyond the social networking site, however, is an open question. If Facebook encourages...

Canine vaccine hesitancy (CVH) can be thought about as dog owners' skepticism about the safety and efficacy of administering routine vaccinations to their dogs. CVH is problematic not only because it may inspire vaccine refusal - which may in turn facilitate infectious disease spread in both canine and human populations - but because it may contrib...

Climate-facilitated spread of mosquito-borne pathogens to new environments elevates the importance of policies that limit greenhouse gas emissions as well as the development and uptake of new pharmaceutical interventions. Whereas past research attempts to bolster support for both through either climate or health risk communication, fewer attempt to...

Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis that threatens the economic well-being of younger generations. One of the key barriers to ensuring the growth of the housing supply is local opposition to development, often called NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). We use a pre-registered study on a nationally representative sample of adult Canadians to expl...

Some might expect the promise of ending a global pandemic via vaccination to interrupt conventional partisan media effect processes. We test that possibility by bringing together sentiment-scored COVID vaccine stories (N > 17,000) from cable and mainstream news outlets, N > 180,000 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports, and six ori...

Social media have long been considered a venue in which conspiracy theories and other misinformation incubate and spread. It has been no different during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, understanding who spreads misinformation by sharing it on social media, and why, has been underexplored, especially in a cross-national context. The global nature o...

Objective. The changing media landscape highlights the need to understand the dynamic nature of Americans’ news consumption patterns. Research to date has focused on understanding how media diets vary across partisanship, while other, cross-cutting cleavages remain under-explored. We focus on the relationship between populism and where Americans ge...

Objective The changing media landscape highlights the need to understand the dynamic nature of Americans’ news consumption patterns. Research to date has focused on understanding how media diets vary across partisanship, while other, cross‐cutting cleavages remain underexplored. We focus on the relationship between populism and where Americans get...

Pundits and public health experts alike suspect that Facebook plays a role in not only exposing Americans to public health misinformation, but potentially encouraging them to seek out misinformation from other sources. Whether or not Facebook is responsible for stimulating misinformation consumption beyond the social networking site, however, is an...

Cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, until recently the host of a nationally syndicated U.S. television show, is among the media figures who have espoused health views unsanctioned by established medical authorities such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. In a large, probability-based national lo...

How do religious affiliation and beliefs shape vaccine attitudes and behaviors? This study examined the associations of attitudes and behaviors relevant to the flu, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), and human-papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines with religious affiliations, as well as philosophical, spiritual, and moral beliefs. Respondents were 3,005 adults f...

Americans today are affectively polarized: they dislike and distrust those from the opposing political party more than they did in the past, with damaging consequences for their democracy. This Element tests one strategy for ameliorating such animus: having ordinary Democrats and Republicans come together for cross-party political discussions. Buil...

While vaccination against COVID-19 represents a clear path toward resuming “normal life,” attitudes toward vaccination and vaccine uptake has been highly politically contentious. In this paper, we investigate (1) whether or not partisan news outlets covered COVID-vaccination issues in different ways, and (2) whether differences in coverage contribu...

Background Efforts to trace the rise of childhood vaccine safety concerns in the US often suggest Andrew Wakefield and colleagues’ retracted 1998 Lancet study (AW98)–which alleged that the MMR vaccine can cause children to develop autism–as a primary cause of US vaccine skepticism. However, a lack of public opinion data on MMR safety collected befo...

A growing number of Americans stay informed about current events through social media. But using social media as a source of news is associated with increased likelihood of being misinformed about important topics, such as COVID-19. The two most popular platforms—Facebook and YouTube—remain relatively understudied in comparison to Twitter, which te...

Background. Efforts to trace the rise of childhood vaccine safety concerns in the US often suggest Andrew Wakefield and colleagues’ retracted 1998 Lancet study (AW98) – which alleged that the MMR vaccine can cause children to develop autism – as a primary cause of US vaccine skepticism. However, a lack of public opinion data on MMR safety collected...

Social media have long been considered a venue in which conspiracy theories originate and spread. It has been no different during COVID-19. However, understanding who spreads conspiracy theories by sharing them on social media, and why, has been underexplored, especially in a cross-national context. The global nature of the novel coronavirus pandem...

A fundamental challenge complicates news decisions about covering vaccine side effects: although serious vaccine side effects are rare, less severe ones do occur occasionally. The study was designed to test whether a side effect message could induce vaccine hesitancy and whether that could be countered by pro-vaccine messages about vaccine safety....

Research examining attitudes and behaviors of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic has largely focused on partisanship as a lens through which many Americans see the coronavirus. Given the importance of partisan affiliation and the degree of partisan polarization in the American society, that is certainly an important driver of public opinion, an...

While the US Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the national legislation to address climate change over the years, there has been much more progress among state and local governments. Is this progress on climate change policy at the subnational level merely a reflection of the dominance of the Democratic Party in certain regions of the country,...

While the U.S. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass national legislation to address climate change over the years, there has been much more progress among state and local governments. But is this progress on climate change policy at the subnational level merely a reflection of the dominance of the Democratic party in certain regions of the countr...

Objectives. To determine whether holding vaccine misconceptions, in the form of negative beliefs about vaccines, correlates with opposing governmental action at all levels designed to increase vaccination (e.g., removing personal belief and religious vaccine exemptions). Methods. Drawing on data from a nationally representative survey of 1938 US ad...

Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. We argue that backlash to out-group cues from Democratic elites played an important role in this process. We construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at the quarterly level from 2001 to...

The novel coronavirus reached the United States and Canada almost at the same time. The first reported American case was January 20, 2020, and in Canada it was January 15, 2020 (Canada, 2020; Holshue et al., 2020). Yet, the response to this crisis has been different in the two countries. In the US, President Donald Trump, prominent Republicans, and...

We utilize nationally representative surveys from the United States and Canada to examine the partisan divide in COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours in both countries. The first cases of COVID-19 in both the US and Canada occurred around the same time, but government responses were starkly different. We explore politically salient assessments of govern...

How Right-Leaning Media Coverage of COVID-19 Facilitated the Spread of Misinformation in the Early Stages of the Pandemic in the U.S. - Matt Motta, Dominik Stecula, Christina Farhart

In recent weeks, several academic and journalistic outlets have documented widespread misinformation about the origins and potential treatment for COVID-19. This misinformation could have important public health consequences if misinformed people are less likely to heed the advice of public health experts. While some have anecdotally tied the preva...

**Forthcoming British Journal of Political Science** Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. We argue that backlash to out-group cues from Democratic elites played an important role in this process. We construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 pub...

Surveys of nearly 2,500 Americans, conducted during a measles outbreak, suggest that users of traditional media are less likely to be misinformed about vaccines than social media users. Results also suggest that an individual’s level of trust in medical experts affects the likelihood that a person’s beliefs about vaccination will change.

The extent to which Americans—especially Republicans—believe in anthropogenic climate change (ACC) has recently been the subject of high profile academic and popular disagreement. We offer a novel framework, and experimental data, for making sense of this debate. Using a large (N = 7,019) and demographically diverse sample of US adults, we compare...

The news media play a influential role in shaping public attitudes on a wide range of issues—climate change included. As climate change has risen in salience, the average American is much more likely to be exposed to news coverage now than in the past. Yet, we don't have a clear understanding of how the content of this news coverage has changed ove...

This working paper discusses the process of designing your first political science course. It covers the preparation of a diverse syllabus, developing learning objectives, structuring lectures and class activities, designing assignments, and setting up an efficient mode of course communication between the instructor and students.

Americans polarized on climate change despite decreasing uncertainty in climate science. Explanations focused on organized climate skeptics and ideologically driven motivated reasoning are likely insufficient. Instead, Americans may have formed their attitudes by using party elite cues. We analyze the content of over 8,000 print, broadcast, and cab...

Americans polarized on climate change despite decreasing uncertainty in climate science. Explanations focused on organized climate skeptics and ideologically driven motivated reasoning are likely insufficient. Instead, Americans may have formed their attitudes by using party elite cues. We conduct analyses on over 8,000 print, broadcast, and cable...

Americans polarized on climate change despite decreasing uncertainty in climate science. Explanations focused on organized climate skeptics and ideologically driven motivated reasoning are likely insufficient. Instead, Americans may have formed their attitudes by using party elite cues. We conduct analyses on over 8,000 print, broadcast, and cable...

Objective: Work on economic news argues that US coverage focuses primarily on changes rather than levels of future economic conditions; it also both affects and reflects public economic sentiment. Given that economic perceptions are related to policy preferences and government support, this is of consequence for politics. This paper explores the ge...

Commentators are often perplexed about why American attitudes are polarized on issues where there is a near scientific consensus. To varying degrees, in terms of both attitudes and levels of scientific consensus, three of such issues are climate change, vaccinations and genetically modified food (GMO) safety. Scientific literature shows that climat...

Economic perceptions affect policy preferences and government support. It thus matters that these perceptions are driven by factors other than the economy, including media coverage. We nevertheless know little about how media reflect economic trends, and whether they influence (or are influenced by) public economic perceptions. This article explore...

Historically, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have relied on mainstream news media to expose human-rights violations and encourage governments to pressure the perpetrators. Thanks to the Internet, NGOs are crafting new strategies for conducting information politics. Despite the obvious democratization of access to the means of communication, h...