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Introduction
FIELDS: Political communication, political psychology
THEORIES: Agenda-setting; framing; news values; scandalization; negativity and incivility; fragmentation and polarization; partisan selective exposure; motivated reasoning
TOPICS: Energy policy; economic policy; elections
METHODS: surveys, quantitative; content analysis, quantitative; computational methods; experiments
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August 2017 - present
February 2009 - July 2017
Publications
Publications (54)
If there are authoritarian, transitional, and democratic political and media systems, are there associated authoritarian, transitional, and democratic role profiles for journalists? The relation between countries’ degree of democracy and the importance of journalistic role conceptions among journalists in a country is analyzed based on the World Jo...
Soziale Medien haben sich zu zentralen Informationsquellen entwickelt und sind dadurch zu einem wichtigen Faktor im Prozess der politischen Meinungsbildung geworden. Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt, inwiefern soziale Medien die Voraussetzungen für Meinungsbildung verändern und wie sich ihre Rolle dabei von der traditioneller Massenmedien untersc...
The media’s capacity to stimulate public concern and create a common ground for issues can counteract the fragmentation of society. Assessing the intactness of the media’s agenda-setting function can be an important diagnostic tool for scholars. However, the manifold design choices in agenda-setting research raise the question of how design choice...
This study explores how strongly and through which mechanisms issue exposure (amount and emphasis of coverage) and news factor exposure (content of coverage that provides newsworthiness reasons) stimulate individual-level agenda-setting effects. Based on a three-wave panel survey that was linked with fitting content analysis data, this is the first...
Social media (SM) are often regarded drivers of personalized echo chambers in which only ideas resonante that individuals already hold, leading to more extreme opinions and intensified opinion expression. However, recent theorizing and evidence has cast doubts on the universal applicability of the echo chamber metaphor, pointing out that communicat...
The diversification of information sources has reignited the controversy on media-induced fragmentation endangering social integration. The media’s capability to set the public agenda and create issues as a common core is a pivotal part of the public sphere and contributes fundamentally to society’s cohesion. Algorithm-driven sources like social me...
This study uses Monte Carlo simulation techniques to estimate the minimum required levels of intercoder reliability in content analysis data for testing correlational hypotheses, depending on sample size, effect size and coder behavior under uncertainty. The ensuing procedure is analogous to power calculations for experimental designs. In most wide...
The present research examines the longitudinal average impact of frequency of use of Internet and social networking sites (SNS) on subjective well-being of adolescents in Germany. Based on five-wave panel data that cover a period of nine years, we disentangle between-person and within-person effects of media use on depressive symptomatology and lif...
Both the news media and citizens have been blamed for citizens’ lack of political sophistication. Citizens’ information source choices can certainly contribute to suboptimal results of opinion formation when citizens’ media menus feature few, redundant, or poor-quality outlets. How strongly news consumers’ choices affect the quality of information...
Search engines are important political news sources and should thus provide users with diverse political information – an important precondition of a well-informed citizenry. The search engines’ algorithmic content selection strongly influences the diversity of the content received by the users – particularly since most users highly trust search en...
Presents a framework for linking data about media content with data about media use of participants to estimate the extent of exposure to the contents as measured in the content analysis. Decisions in content-user linking involve (1) the time frame, (2) the effect curve, (3) the specificity and resolution of media use measures, and (4) the treatmen...
Whether agenda-setting effects occur and how strong they are appear to be strongly context-dependent. The baseline public and media salience of an issue and the extent of abrupt changes in salience have been mentioned as potential contingent conditions, but without any empirical follow-ups. First, this study demonstrates how agenda-setting effects...
Theorizing on mediatization of politics stresses the importance of structural conditions on different levels of media systems for explaining the increasing importance of media logic in media coverage. Levels of autonomy of media from politics and the extent of commercialization pressure are considered particularly important. However, most studies i...
Bevor wissenschaftliche Beiträge in Fachzeitschriften publiziert oder auf Tagungen präsentiert werden, überprüfen Herausgeber*innen bzw. Organisator*innen die Qualität der Einreichungen. Dies geschieht zumeist im Peer-Review-Verfahren, bei dem unabhängige Kolleg*innen aus dem gleichen Forschungsgebiet die Einreichung begutachten. Die vorliegende St...
This volume offers insights into current research on the reception and effects of the digital revolution in public communication in the field of communication science. The contributions it contains deal with questions about the use of news on Facebook, the articulation of opinions on the public Net and the influencing of opinions on social media (e...
In this book, 30 contributions provide a comprehensive overview of theories and findings from research on political attitudes and political behaviour, subdivided into the fields of ‘political communication’, ‘political attitudes’, ‘political participation’, ‘voting behaviour’ and ‘methods’.
The diversification of the political information supply has raised concerns about social integration and collective democratic self-determination. Automatically personalised media content on social network sites such as Facebook which make use of individual online behaviour are often suspected of facilitating fragmentation. People with extreme poli...
Latent growth curve models (LGCM) are a versatile tool to model change in individual units over time. The most common application in communication research is the analysis of panel data. Univariate LGCMs describe the change of a single observed or latent variable over time. Multivariate LGCMs include predictors of growth processes, consequences of...
When examining media effects, scholars of political communication have focused on (1) the effects of the mass media’s emphasis of parties or candidates (and their attributes) on voting intentions (visibility-based effects) and (b) learning and persuasion models that look at the effects of positive and negative evaluations of parties or candidates (...
Scandalization is a communication process in which alleged transgressions or failures of public figures, groups, organizations, or institutions are denounced with the aim of eliciting public outrage—“public outrage” meaning the widespread and largely unchallenged belief that the accusations are true, the public figure is to blame for the alleged tr...
Key events catalyze frame building processes and competition between frames. A longitudinal study (54 weeks) analyzes framing of economic policy after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (2008–2009) in German media to investigate the dynamics of frame struggles. As hypothesized, status and resources of frame sponsors and cultural resonance of frames...
In seiner breit angelegten Aufarbeitung der frühen Literatur zum Framing-Ansatz stellt Bertram Scheufele viele einflussreiche Studien erstmals in deutscher Sprache in einen größeren Zusammenhang und entwickelt vielversprechende Ansätze für eine kohärente, schematheoretisch ausgerichtete Framing-Theorie. Ein wichtiger Aspekt sind dabei Scheufeles Üb...
This study investigates how traditional news media and Internet services have become entangled in recipients’ habits of gathering information on current topics. Push media enable citizens to scan the issue environment while pull media enable them to seek out in-depth information if information needs have been elicited. Furthermore, content quality...
„Was lange gärt, wird endlich Wut.“Mit diesem umformulierten Sprichwort lässt sich die Entwicklung der Proteste um Stuttgart 21 (S21) treffend charakterisieren. Das Projekt ist eines der umstrittensten Verkehrs- und Städtebauprojekte in Deutschland und beschäftigt die Bevölkerung – insbesondere die Stuttgarter Bürger – seit Jahrzehnten: Zum einen s...
Computer technologies continue to develop at breakneck speed, with a rapid flow of new innovations to the market. The survey of journalists undertaken in this work addresses four key questions: How do IT journalists view their professional role? How do they assess their impact on consumers and manufacturers? What sort of ties do they have to indust...
Die Freiheit der Medien gilt als Voraussetzung für die Funktionsfähigkeit der Demokratie. Diese These ist durch historische Beispiele und quantitative Studien empirisch belegt (Norris 2003).
Mit Lehman Brothers meldete am 15. September 2008 erstmals ein Finanzinstitut Insolvenz an, das als „too big to fail“ galt. Somit trat die zuvor kaum für möglich gehaltene Situation ein, dass Gläubiger einer Bank direkt von Zahlungsausfällen betroffen waren, die angesichts ihrer schieren Größe, Vernetzung und Komplexität als relevant für die Stabil...
Krisen sind Zeiten des Umbruchs, in denen Weichen für die Zukunft gestellt werden und die Chancen und Risiken für gesellschaftliche Interessengruppen bergen. Anlässlich einer Krise werden wegweisende Entscheidungen getroffen, die auch in zukünftigen Entscheidungen nachwirken.
Die Bedeutung des Begriffs „Solidarität“ ist, wenn man sich auf die notwendigen Elemente konzentriert, weitgehend unstrittig.
Die Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise erzeugte große Unsicherheit: Drohte eine ähnlich katastrophale Krise wie Ende der zwanziger Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts, die als Weltwirtschaftskrise in das kollektive Gedächtnis der Deutschen und der westlichen Welt eingegangen ist ? Das Gros der Experten hatte das Auftreten der Krise 2008 nicht kommen sehen.
Die wirtschaftliche Lage ist wie andere reale Gegebenheiten vom Standpunkt des etrachters abhängig. Ob die Wirtschaft sich in einer Krise befindet und wenn ja, worin diese Krise besteht, ist trotz aller Wirtschaftsindikatoren kein objektiver Sachverhalt.
Angesichts der weiten Verbreitung und der Bedeutung von Informationstechnologien muss man das Fehlen von empirischen Studien über IT-Journalisten als eine Forschungslücke ansehen. Diese kleine Journalistengruppe stellt wichtige Gatekeeper für den IT-Markt und seine Produkte. Die aus dieser Rolle erwachsende Machtposition zu untersuchen ist das zent...
Das Verhältnis von Wirklichkeit und ihrer medialen Darstellung ist seit Jahrzehnten eines der zentralen Themen der Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. Die Frage, wie die Medien die Realität darstellen, hat für viele Forschungsfelder des Fachs Relevanz – etwa für die Nachrichtenselektionsforschung, politische Kommunikationsforschung, Journa...
Information technology is ever-changing. Information and communication technology (ICT) journalists play a significant part in diffusing, explaining and interpreting these new technologies and in forging the societal understanding of future trends, influencing both their audience and the developers they cover. They are important gatekeepers and the...
When covering violations of social norms by public figures, the mass media depict the resulting damages and attribute responsibility to actors. These depictions of responsibility constitute frames that elicit reactions from recipients. A theory regarding the effects of these media frames on cognitions, emotions, and opinions is presented. Content a...
Based on a survey different role perceptions of judges are identified, their correlations to various aspects of decision making are discussed.
Information technology is ever-changing – and as its applications become more sophisticated, they become more complicated for users as well. In this perplexing field, several trends such as growing digitalization, interconnectedness, and convergence are often discussed among experts and laymen. IT Journalists play a significant part in diffusing, e...
News waves attracting a lot of media attention may distract the mass media—and the public—from other, more important and pressing problems. This study assumes that killer issues and leader issues may distract or attract attention towards victim or follower issues, respectively. Furthermore, it is assumed that key events and corresponding news waves...
Das politische System der römischen Republik unterscheidet sich deutlich von allen demokratischen Systemen der Moderne. Wahlkämpfe in Rom waren in vielerlei Hinsicht anders als die in diesem Buch vorgestellten Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland. Viele Strukturen und Prinzipien, die heutige Demokratien, auch die deutsche, prägen, waren entweder nicht bekannt...
