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The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect
Abstract
Over the last two decades, as the number of media choices available to consumers has exploded, so too have worries over self-selection into media audiences. Some fear greater apathy, others heightened polarization. In this article, we shed light on the latter possibility. We identify the impact of access to broadband Internet on affective polarization by exploiting differences in broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations (ROW). We merge state-level regulation data with county-level broadband penetration data and a large-N sample of survey data from 2004 to 2008 and find that access to broadband Internet increases partisan hostility. The effect occurs in both years and is stable across levels of political interest. We also find that access to broadband Internet boosts partisans' consumption of partisan media, a likely cause of increased polarization. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LWED0F.
... This conclusion was confirmed by a recent study on the spread of fabricated news and conspiracy theories on the Facebook pages of German alternative media outlets (Boberg et al. 2020). There have also been first studies on the impact of social media use on affective polarization (Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar 2017;Suhay, Bello-Pardo, and Maurer 2018;Asimovic et al. 2021) and on the prevalence of affective polarization in social media debates (Harel, Jameson, and Maoz 2020;Yarchi et al. 2021). Yet to this point, little is known about the extent to which online debates not only display features of identity-based affective polarization but also show signs of outright intolerance vis-à-vis the political opponent. ...
... Although people who write user comments on online news platforms are driven by very specific motives (Springer, Engelmann, and Pfaffinger 2015), suggesting that the views they express should not be interpreted as generalizable, many more people actually read these comments, which means that the impact of the opinions voiced in such user comments may be much higher than just representing the views of a specific minority of active commenters. Since most previous studies on affective polarization have relied on surveys (Lelkes 2016;Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar 2017;Suhay, Bello-Pardo, and Maurer 2018;Iyengar et al. 2019;Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro 2020;Asimovic et al. 2021; but see Harel, Jameson, and Maoz 2020;Yarchi et al. 2021) analysing Facebook debates has the additional advantage that it may provide insights into the prevalence of affective polarization in people's political behaviour, as opposed to their political attitudes. ...
... Second, in contrast to recent studies on affective polarization, which have tended to focus heavily on the polarization of political attitudes using techniques from quantitative research (e.g. traditional survey-based methods as well as social network analysis; see, for example, Lelkes 2016; Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar 2017;Suhay, Bello-Pardo, and Maurer 2018;Iyengar et al. 2019;Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro 2020;Asimovic et al. 2021), we contribute to the smaller body of qualitative research on affective polarization at the level of online political behaviour by using qualitative online discourse analysis (see also Tucker et al. 2018, 11; for other qualitative work in this field, see Steuter and Wills 2009;Krochik and Jost 2011;Harel, Jameson, and Maoz 2020;Wodak and Rheindorf 2022). The richness of this qualitative approach allowed us to explore in-depth the role of outright political intolerance in people's affective attitudes toward their opponents, gaining new insights into how affective polarization may unfold differently in online debates. ...
To what extent do online debates display features of political polarization and in how far does polarization pose a problem for democracy? We zoom in on affective polarization: the formation of societal groups with hostile feelings towards each other, arguing that affective polarization is particularly problematic for democracy if it features elements of political intolerance, which undermines key tenets of even the most conflict-prone theories of democracy. While affective polarization has been on the rise in several countries, Germany has been considered to be a country with low, and even declining levels of affective polarization. But does this still hold true during the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw a rapid rise in conspiracy theories? Based on a qualitative discourse analysis of online debates about Covid-19 on the Facebook platforms of a mainstream and a non-mainstream German media outlet, we find strong traces of affective polarization on both platforms, involving clear indications of political intolerance. Our findings suggest that the democratic discourse is threatened by the nature of online debates about Covid-19, and it is threatened not only by anti-rationalist conspiracists at the ideological extremes but also by the intolerance of more moderate rationalists at the centre of the political spectrum.
... Furthermore, they came to be associated with greater political apathy and declining political efficacy and trust in politics (for a review on the "media malaise" perspective, see Strömbäck & Shehata, 2010). Finally, many pointed to social media as potentially homogeneous and closed communication spheres, similar to echo chambers, with the fragmentation of political knowledge and ever-increasing political polarization (Lelkes, Sood, & Iyengar, 2017). The latter problem, in particular, has been linked to the expansion of choice availability (Iyengar et al., 2019). ...
... Various studies have confirmed the electoral implications of negative partisanship in Western parliamentary democracies (Medeiros & Noël, 2014;Mayer, 2017). These developments have been fueled by transformations in political communication and the media environment, marked by the proliferation of partisan media, resort to strategies of negative campaigning, and the generation of social media bubbles (Lelkes, Sood, & Iyengar, 2017;Iyengar et al., 2019). We argue that the same mechanisms may favor the diffusion of a negative form of personalization. ...
... Partisan selective exposure to news content may confine voters in social media bubbles operating as echo chambers, or expose them to disinformation aimed at reinforcing their antagonism toward political adversaries (Garrett, 2009;Shin & Thorson, 2017). Rather than breaking with the older media pattern, the claim is that online political information boosts levels of partisan media consumption (Lelkes, Sood, & Iyengar, 2017). The described changes in the media landscape and political environment are likely to resonate with the electorate. ...
Leaders without Partisans examines the changing impact of party leader evaluations on voters’ behavior in parliamentary elections. The decline of traditional social cleavages, the pervasive mediatization of the political scene, and the media’s growing tendency to portray politics in “personalistic” terms all led to the hypothesis that leaders matter more for the way individuals vote and, often, the way elections turn out. This study offers the most comprehensive longitudinal assessment of this hypothesis so far. The authors develop a composite theoretical framework – based on currently disconnected strands of research from party, media, and electoral studies – and test it empirically on the most encompassing set of national election study datasets ever assembled. The labor-intensive harmonization effort produces an unprecedented dataset pooling information for a total of 129 parliamentary elections conducted between 1961 and 2018 in 14 West European countries.
The book provides evidence of the longitudinal growth in leader effects on vote choice and on turnout. The process of partisan dealignment and changes in the structure of mass communication in Western societies are identified as the main drivers of personalization in voting behavior.
... Scholarship on the determinants of polarization is heavily concentrated on the United States, and cross-national studies are generally lacking. The few cross-national studies that exist focus on socio-economic causes of polarization such as inequality and unemployment rates (Gidron et al., 2019;Grechyna, 2016), the role of elite polarization (Banda and Cluverius, 2018) and social sorting (Mason, 2016), or the divisive nature of social media (Lelkes et al., 2017). Current literature largely overlooks the institutional roots of mass polarization. ...
... For example, Boxell et al. (2021) provide empirical evidence that the non-white share of population in a country is among the strongest predictors of affective polarization. Fourth, there is a separate line of literature on the polarizing effects of the contemporary media, both in its traditional format (see e.g., Martin and Yurukoglu, 2017), and in the digital sphere (Lelkes et al., 2017). Last but not the least, scholars investigate the effects of institutional design on political polarization. ...
Although political polarization is in the center of contemporary
debates on democratic backsliding, the institutional determinants of this phenomenon remain understudied. In this paper, we investigate how the form of government can affect polarization levels in a country. Specifically, we focus on the role of executive elections as the primary mechanism. Presenting both a formal model and cross-national empirical analyses, we show that executive elections under presidential regimes are significantly more likely to affect political polarization among citizens. Candidates in parliamentary systems are often party leaders who are committed to party policies and cannot deviate much to disclose new information. In contrast, presidential candidates can strategically design the discourse in their election campaigns, thus influencing voters’ opinions and making mass polarization more likely. Our empirical analysis shows that this effect is nonlinear and especially profound when the initial polarization in a country is low.
... Scholarship seeking to explain the rising polarization has centrally implicated the digitalization of media and communication systems (2)(3)(4). However, while studies have identified a link between digital media and rising polarization (2,5,6), the causal mechanism at play has been subject to significant debate (7). ...
... Scholarship seeking to explain the rising polarization has centrally implicated the digitalization of media and communication systems (2)(3)(4). However, while studies have identified a link between digital media and rising polarization (2,5,6), the causal mechanism at play has been subject to significant debate (7). "Selective exposure" has long been a dominant hypothesis, suggesting that polarization on digital media is driven by individuals isolating themselves into so-called "echo chambers"-homogeneous clusters protected from opposing individuals and perspectives-which are said to lead to the divergence of opinions toward more extreme positions (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13). ...
Politics has in recent decades entered an era of intense polarization. Explanations have implicated digital media, with the so-called echo chamber remaining a dominant causal hypothesis despite growing challenge by empirical evidence. This paper suggests that this mounting evidence provides not only reason to reject the echo chamber hypothesis but also the foundation for an alternative causal mechanism. To propose such a mechanism , the paper draws on the literatures on affective polarization, digital media, and opinion dynamics. From the affective polarization literature, we follow the move from seeing polarization as diverging issue positions to rooted in sorting: an alignment of differences which is effectively dividing the electorate into two increasingly homogeneous megaparties. To explain the rise in sorting, the paper draws on opinion dynamics and digital media research to present a model which essentially turns the echo chamber on its head: it is not isolation from opposing views that drives polarization but precisely the fact that digital media bring us to interact outside our local bubble. When individuals interact locally, the outcome is a stable plural patchwork of cross-cutting conflicts. By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines, thus effacing the counterbalancing effects of local heterogeneity. The result is polarization, even if individual interaction leads to convergence. The model thus suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division.
... The third section describes our experimental design and hypotheses, highlighting the difference between activation by users (self) and the expected activation by friends (peers Few phenomena are as characteristic of our times as political polarization (Mason, 2018;Iyengar et al., 2012;Abramowitz andSaunders, 2008, Gidron et al., 2019). In the scholarship that developed to explain the causes of polarization, researchers frequently ask whether social media and the emergent digital technologies contributed to heightened levels of perceived polarization (Lelkes et al., 2017;Stroud, 2010;Settle, 2018;Sunstein, 2018, Bail et al. 2018. ...
... The expected correlation between ideological preferences and attention to issues is predicated on differences in motivated reasoning and hot cognition (Slothuus and De Vreese, 2010;Lelkes et al., 2017), where information that validates existing beliefs is more readily searched and shared by ideologues. If negative and positive evaluations of political events result in voters seeking and delivering information that is consistent with their preferences, motivated voters will be both more enthusiastic as well as more attuned to particular types of evidence, which will positively correlate ideological beliefs and issue attention (Weaver, 1991). ...
Our paper describes how the users' decisions to share content alter the frequencies of the frame elements observed by social media peers. Changes in the frequency of distinct frame elements, in different regions of a social network, shape how individuals interpret, classify, and define situations and events. We label this process Network Activated Frames (NAF). We test the mechanisms behind NAF with an original image-based conjoint design that replicates network activation in three surveys. Results show that partisans share more content than non-partisans and that their preferences are different from that of non-partisans. Our findings show that a network of peers with cross-cutting ideological preferences may be perceived as a bubble if partisans amplify content they like at higher rates. Beginning with fully randomized probabilities, the output from our experiments is more extreme than the preference of the median users, as partisans activate more and different frame elements than non-partisans. We implement the survey experiments in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
... Partisan media frames the coverage of politicians' actions from a party-oriented point of view, judging their actions as good or bad from a partisan perspective (Sikder et al., 2020). Furthermore, the new media platforms have enriched the supply of political news and commentators and made it free and accessible 24/7, which has increased the exposure of voters to partisan outlets (Lelkes et al., 2017). The accelerated consumption of partisan media induces voters to favor their in-group partisans, and incites hatred toward political rivals, reinforcing social and political sorting processes (Lelkes et al., 2017;Tsfati & Nir, 2017). ...
... Furthermore, the new media platforms have enriched the supply of political news and commentators and made it free and accessible 24/7, which has increased the exposure of voters to partisan outlets (Lelkes et al., 2017). The accelerated consumption of partisan media induces voters to favor their in-group partisans, and incites hatred toward political rivals, reinforcing social and political sorting processes (Lelkes et al., 2017;Tsfati & Nir, 2017). ...
This chapter considers the blame avoidance literature in view of the rise of affective polarization. The works that laid the foundations of the current blame avoidance literature (Hood, 2002; Pierson, 1996; Weaver, 1986) have made substantive contributions and have advanced our understanding of central features of legislative and executive policymaking, institutional choices and delegation, and crisis management. Blame avoidance models make simplifying assumptions about certain features of the political reality. We contend that the main theoretical models of blame avoidance rest on two, mainly implicit, assumptions that are challenged under conditions of high affective polarization. In this chapter, we assess the applicability of these assumptions under conditions of high affective polarization, and the implications of affective polarization for blame generation and blame avoidance.
... In recent years, scholars have observed a wide division in terms of information networks among partisans (Brady et al., 2017). Partisans are particularly drawn to polarized news sources or partisan "echo chambers" which provide information that further affirms their attitudes and beliefs (Bakshy et al., 2015;Lau et al., 2020;Lelkes et al., 2017). Such a divided pattern of information consumption has led the American people to arrive at different conclusions and thus different emotions and behaviors regarding the pandemic . ...
... We referenced Pew Research Center's report on US adults' media consumption pattern (Jurkowitz et al., 2020) and limited our sample to the most trusted and most distrusted news outlets by Democrats and Republicans in order to account for selective exposure and confirmation biasphenomena that are prevalent in partisan news consumption (Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2017;Lelkes et al., 2017). CNN, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, New York Times, and PBS were determined as outlets trusted by Democrats, and ABC, Breitbart, FOX, The New York Post, and the Rush Limbaugh show represented news outlets trusted by Republicans. 1 Using Nexis UNI and Media Cloud (an open-source platform that tracks the contents of online news; see Media Cloud.org), ...
Operationalizing social group identification as political partisanship, we examine followers’ (i.e., US residents’) affective experiences and behavioral responses during the initial COVID‐19 outbreak in the United States (March to May 2020). In Study 1, we conducted content analyses on major news outlets’ coverage of COVID‐19 (N = 4319) to examine media polarization and how it plays a role in shaping followers’ perceptions of the pandemic and leadership. News outlets trusted by Republicans portrayed US President Donald Trump as more effective, conveyed a stronger sense of certainty with less negative affective tone, and had a lower emphasis on COVID‐19 prevention compared to outlets trusted by Democrats. We then conducted a field survey study (Study 2; N = 214) and found that Republicans perceived Trump as more effective, experienced higher positive affect, and engaged in less COVID‐19 preventive behavior compared to Democrats. Using a longitudinal survey design in Study 3 (N = 251), we examined how emotional responses evolved in parallel with the pandemic and found further support for Study 2 findings. Collectively, our findings provide insight into the process of leadership from a social identity perspective during times of crisis, illustrating how social identity can inhibit mobilization of united efforts. The findings have implications for leadership of subgroup divides in different organizational and crisis contexts.
... To study the effects of echo chambers and filter bubbles, a first set of studies used an indirect strategy, exploiting exogenous variation in expansion of broadband Internet access to establish a causal link between Internet usage and political outcomes. In the US context, high-speed Internet was found to increase affective polarization (Lelkes et al., 2017), that is, the extent to which Americans dislike and distrust supporters of the other party (Iyengar et al., 2019). The study found that people are more likely to visit partisan media when they have access to broadband Internet, and that respondents with access to broadband Internet (instrumented by legislation facilitating its expansion) exhibit stronger partisan affect (Lelkes et al., 2017). ...
... In the US context, high-speed Internet was found to increase affective polarization (Lelkes et al., 2017), that is, the extent to which Americans dislike and distrust supporters of the other party (Iyengar et al., 2019). The study found that people are more likely to visit partisan media when they have access to broadband Internet, and that respondents with access to broadband Internet (instrumented by legislation facilitating its expansion) exhibit stronger partisan affect (Lelkes et al., 2017). Another study using data from Germany and Italy and broadband coverage as an instrument for online political news consumption concluded that Internet access has a positive effect on support for populist parties (Schaub and Morisi, 2020). ...
This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information among citizen and political actors, the connection between the mass public and political elites, and the development of policy responses to societal problems. This element discusses how digital technology has shaped these different domains, identifies areas of research consensus as well as unresolved questions, and argues that a key perspective involves issue definition, that is, how the nature of the problems raised by digital technology is subject to political contestation.
... He clarified his argument, saying that "social media facilitates us linking our negative attitudes about the parties, politicians, and policies we disagree with to our attitudes about the people who support them." Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar (2017) also found a positive association between internet access and affective polarization. Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed. ...
... Of them, YouTube and Instagram consumers are more likely to have politically polarized views. Overall results of social media consumption's association with polarization added understanding of specific social media platforms to the literature having mixed evidences in this regard (Boxell, Gentzkow, & Shapiro, 2017;Settle, 2018;Lelkes, Sood, & Iyengar, 2017). ...
This article examines the factors that predict affective polarization and political engagement in the United States. Using an original survey dataset (N = 1,100) of a fairly representative national sample, this study explored some factors (e.g., age, gender, political ideology, and partisan news media and social media) to see how they predict affective polarization and political engagement. The results could be helpful to further study widening affective polarization, which is reportedly affecting democracy itself, in this current political and public opinion atmosphere “Trumpfied” in the last couple of years. The insights found in this research could also help devise political and social campaign strategies that minimize polarization gaps. The results might enable corporate entities to better classify their consumers based on relevant issues associated with polarization and political engagement. Future research is encouraged to combine survey data and social media data for a more refined outcome.
... In addition, people may dismiss information that conflicts with their political orientation (Strickland et al., 2011), and political polarization can lead different segments of the public to derive different conclusions about threats (Lelkes et al., 2017). This can occur through partisan news sources (Bakshy et al., 2015) and 'echo chambers' (Lelkes et al., 2017) that amplify partisan communication (Brady et al., 2017). ...
... In addition, people may dismiss information that conflicts with their political orientation (Strickland et al., 2011), and political polarization can lead different segments of the public to derive different conclusions about threats (Lelkes et al., 2017). This can occur through partisan news sources (Bakshy et al., 2015) and 'echo chambers' (Lelkes et al., 2017) that amplify partisan communication (Brady et al., 2017). Political polarization is also associated with misperceptions of other political parties (Lees and Cikara, 2021), which can decrease trust (Hetherington and Weiler, 2015) in other political parties (Iyengar et al., 2019). ...
We examined the relationship between political affiliation, perceptual (percentage, slope) estimates, and subjective judgements of disease prevalence and mortality across three chart types. An online survey (N = 787) exposed separate groups of participants to charts displaying (a) COVID-19 data or (b) COVID-19 data labeled ‘Influenza (Flu)’. Block 1 examined responses to cross-sectional mortality data (bar graphs, treemaps); results revealed that perceptual estimates comparing mortality in two countries were similar across political affiliations and chart types (all ps > .05), while subjective judgements revealed a disease x political party interaction ( p < .05). Although Democrats and Republicans provided similar proportion estimates, Democrats interpreted mortality to be higher than Republicans; Democrats also interpreted mortality to be higher for COVID-19 than Influenza. Block 2 examined responses to time series (line graphs); Democrats and Republicans estimated greater slopes for COVID-19 trend lines than Influenza lines ( p < .001); subjective judgements revealed a disease x political party interaction ( p < .05). Democrats and Republicans indicated similar subjective rates of change for COVID-19 trends, and Democrats indicated lower subjective rates of change for Influenza than in any other condition. Thus, while Democrats and Republicans saw the graphs similarly in terms of percentages and line slopes, their subjective interpretations diverged. While we may see graphs of infectious disease data similarly from a purely mathematical or geometric perspective, our political affiliations may moderate how we subjectively interpret the data.
... Recent studies have examined the impact of new technologies, like Twitter and YouTube, on election outcomes [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] , including the effects of disinformation [19][20][21][22][23][24][25] . Other studies have documented how social media platforms contribute to polarization through the creation of echo chambers [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] . ...
Social media has been transforming political communication dynamics for over a decade. Here using nearly a billion tweets, we analyse the change in Twitter’s news media landscape between the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. Using political bias and fact-checking tools, we measure the volume of politically biased content and the number of users propagating such information. We then identify influencers—users with the greatest ability to spread news in the Twitter network. We observe that the fraction of fake and extremely biased content declined between 2016 and 2020. However, results show increasing echo chamber behaviours and latent ideological polarization across the two elections at the user and influencer levels.
... Se podría estar estableciendo una ilusión emocional y política, la de pensar la realidad a partir de nuestro timeline, que ocurriría en entornos dominados por la posverdad y la presencia de medios militantes. De hecho, Lelkes et al. (2017) lograron relacionar el acceso a Internet de banda ancha con el consumo de medios militantes y este con la hostilidad afectiva entre simpatizantes. ...
Affective polarization has recently become one of the phenomena of greatest interest to social researchers. The large number of papers on this concept requires a systematic review to organize its main explanatory theories. In the following, we analyse the distinctive dimensions of affective polarization, a political polarization with non-political effects, and the hypotheses that help us to understand its emergence, from the perspective of the masses, the elites and the media ecosystem. In particular, we are confronted with the possibility that ideological radicalization is at the origin of this affective polarization or that, on the con t rary, without being so far apart in ideas, it is the constitution of political identities as social identities that causes a perceptual sense of false polarization that induces greater animosity between the supporters of the conflicting groups.
... In European countries that experienced a rapid expansion of broadband availability and 3G networks, populist parties reportedly saw their vote shares rise (e.g., Campante et al. 2018, Schaub andMorisi 2020). In the US, both structural county-level broadband access (Lelkes et al. 2017) and individual social media use (Bail et al. 2018, Allcott et al. 2020 have been found to increase partisan hostility and polarization. The findings also converge on the negative impact of digital media on institutional and political trust (Pietsch andMartin 2011, Im et al. 2014, Sabatini and Sarracino 2019, Zimmermann et al. 2020). ...
This paper scrutinizes the effect of social media use on institutional trust in the European Union (EU) among European citizens. Fixed-effects regression models on data from the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019, the year of the most recent European Parliament (EP) elections, demonstrate that higher social media use is associated with lower trust in the EU. More importantly, social media usage habits exert particularly detrimental effects in regions with wider and faster internet connections. In such high-information environments, those who more frequently use online social networks, tend to trust those networks, and receive information on EU affairs from these networks, have less faith in the EU compared to those in regions with lower-quality internet access. In contrast, in regions with lower broadband access, receiving EU information from social media fosters political trust.
... Politics in many countries has in recent decades entered an era of unprecedented political polarization, with growing divides between political camps and harshening public discourse [1-3]. Scholars have long discussed new media technology as a potential driver of this rise of polarization [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], with the so-called "echo chamber" as the most prominent causal link. According to this hypothesis, new media technology facilitates the formation of clusters of likeminded individuals [12]. ...
The influential “echo chamber” hypothesis suggests that social media drive polarization through a mutual reinforcement between isolation and radicalization. The existence of such echo chambers has been a central focus of academic debate, with competing studies finding ostensibly contradictory empirical evidence. This paper identifies a fundamental methodological limitation of these empirical studies: they do not differentiate between negative and positive interactions. To overcome this limitation, we develop a method to extract signed network representations of Twitter debates using Machine Learning. Applying our approach to a major Dutch cultural controversy, we show that the inclusion of negative interactions provides a new empirical picture of the dynamics of online polarization. Our findings suggest that conflict, not isolation, is at the heart of polarization.
... Another issue with polarization during a pandemic is that it could lead different segments of the population to reach different conclusions about the threat in the situation and appropriate action. Community members may receive different types of news, allowing them to self-select divided news outlets or partisan "echo chambers" (Bakshy, Messing, & Adamic, 2015;Lelkes, Sood, & Iyengar, 2017) or they may communicate in ways that involve less cross-party knowledge sharing (Brady, Wills, Jost, Tucker, & Van Bavel, 2017). Fake news must be reported and countered, which may lead the population to partisanmotivated beliefs. ...
In Pakistan, the first case of COVID-19 was reported on February 26, 2020. As of
September 18, 2020, Pakistan had 304,386 confirmed cases, out of which 291,683
patients were discharged, and 6,408 (2%) deaths took place. This narrative aimed
to rapidly review Pakistan’s early successes in mitigating the COVID-19
pandemic. Initially, Pakistan did not allow anyone to enter the country from China,
the center of the outbreak. National Command Operation Center (NCOC) ordered
a lockdown for one month. However, Prime Minister (PM) and NCOC converted
it into a Smart Lockdown to minimize the economic losses. Some quick and early
initiatives by Pakistani leadership included the formulation of SOPs and initiation
of programs like Resource Management System (RMS), Pak Negheyban
application, Integrated Disease Information Management System (IDIMS),
National helpline-1166, WhatsApp Chatbot (+92300-1111166), Isolated Hospitals,
Infectious Treatment Centre, COVID-19 Telehealth Portal, Community
Mobilization, Prime Minister's Relief Fund, Ehsaas Program, Smart Lockdowns,
and Tiger Force. Early and quick initiatives by Pakistan helped slow down the
spread of infection in the country. These initiatives against COVID-19 were also
praised by WHO and included Pakistan among countries that effectively control
the spread of infection.
... Here, too, the evidence is mixed. In those parts of the country where broadband is more available, traffic to partisan news sites is greater (Lelkes et al., 2017). Moreover, Lelkes et al. go on to show that broadband diffusion has strengthened partisan affect. ...
While most research on party polarisation previously focused on the ideological extremity of party positions, in recent years a new form of polarisation has emerged in the American electorate. Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and fear those from the other party. This phenomenon of animosity across the party divide is known as affective polarisation. I summarise the evidence bearing on the extent of affective polarisation in the United States, trace its origins to the power of partisanship as a social identity, and identify the psychological mechanisms that contribute to heightened out-party animus. In closing, I consider the implications of heightened partisan animus for the democratic process.
... Political elites, by their explicit appeals to in-groups and their rejection of out-groups, have been shown to contribute to deepening affective polarization (Abramowitz & McCoy, 2019;Iyengar et al., 2019;Levendusky, 2018;Sood & Iyengar, 2016). An extended exposure to negative campaigns via partisan news and biased content activates partisanship and partisan hostility, thereby increasing affective polarization (Boxell et al., 2020;Garrett et al., 2014;Iyengar et al., 2019;Lelkes et al., 2017). ...
This paper investigates divergences in levels of affective polarization across Belgian regions around the 2019 elections. Elaborating on the relative deprivation theory, we analyse the role of current and long-term socioeconomic regional inequalities and of geographical distance separating regions. Empirically, we aggregate individual-level measures of affective polarization at the Belgian NUTS-3 level and use a gravity approach to explore the determinants of regional divergences. Our results show that regional variations in affective polarization are best explained by a current rural-urban divide and by how regions have performed economically in the last years. We also show that geographical proximity matters and reinforces the effects of economic deprivation.
... Finally, our results enrich the literature on the role of media and the internet on electoral behaviour. There is extensive evidence on how traditional media, such as newspaper (Gerber et al., 2009;Chiang and Knight, 2011;Drago et al., 2014), television (DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007;Gerber et al., 2011;Peisakhin and Rozenas, 2018) and the internet (Jaber, 2013;Larcinese and Miner, 2012;Miner, 2015;Falck et al., 2014;Lelkes et al., 2017;Gavazza et al., 2018;Poy and Schüller, 2020;Munger et al., 2020) affect voting behaviour. ...
We study the impact of fake news on votes for populist parties in the Italian elections of 2018. Our empirical strategy exploits the historical variation in Italian-speaking and German-speaking voters in the Italian region of Trentino Alto-Adige/Südtirol as an exogenous source of assignment to fake news exposure. Using municipal data, we compare the effect of exposure to fake news on the vote for populist parties in the 2013 and 2018 elections. To do so, we introduce a novel indicator of populism using text mining on the Facebook posts of Italian parties before the elections. Our findings support the view that exposure to fake news favours populist parties regardless of prior support for populist parties, but also that fake news alone cannot explain most of the growth in populism.
... Relatedly, another potential source of partisan bias is people's tendency to seek out information that is consistent with prior beliefs and group identities, i.e., selective exposure. The rise of cable news and social media has made it particularly easy for already polarized people to find an abundance of news sources expressing negative stories about political out-groups and positive depictions of the in-party(s) (Lelkes et al., 2017). ...
Research on affective polarization and negative partisanship toward disliked out-parties has increased significantly in recent years. However, there are surprisingly few studies that actually examine its political consequences, especially outside of the US. This study relies on two survey experiments to examine how dislike toward out-parties affected how Norwegian citizens evaluated the country's response to the coronavirus crisis. The first experiment follows the example of previous research on the US case and tests how out-party dislike measured before the coronavirus outbreak affected subsequent attitudes about how Norway and the conservative government had managed the crisis. The second experiment then randomly assigns party cues to a policy proposal included in the country's economic rescue package and tests whether like-dislike party evaluations moderate the effect of receiving the party cues. Overall, the results show that out-party dislike predicted attitudes to the government's response, but, contrary to studies focusing on the US case, this effect was either nonexistent or weaker for those who rated the country's response. Additionally, while out-party cues polarized opinions to the proposal, the moderating effect of out-party dislike was only more consistently found for those who received party cues from the populist-right party.
... Many factors likely interact to intensify the "we vs. they" categorization (Iyengar et al., 2019). Previous studies have proposed reasons including heightened ideological sorting (Mason, 2016;Rogowski and Sutherland, 2016), a political and high-choice media environment (Berry and Sobieraj, 2013;Del Vicario et al., 2016;Lelkes et al., 2017;Tucker et al., 2018;Iyengar et al., 2019), as well as negative campaign advertising and stereotypes (Sood and Iyengar, 2016). While there is empirical evidence to back up these notions, there have also been findings that call for cautiousness in prematurely interpreting all these factors as major culprits behind surges in affective polarization (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010;Prior, 2013;Nordbrandt, 2021b;Lorenzo-Rodríguez and Torcal, 2022;Torcal and Comellas, 2022). ...
Despite its potentially pernicious consequences for social relations and democracy, the study of affective polarization has only recently proliferated. Thus, the reasons driving this development—or its consequences—are not yet adequately understood. This article addresses the role of one specific factor frequently discussed in both academic and popular debate—namely, the role of crosscutting communication among people of different political leanings. It is a longstanding notion that crosscutting communication is crucial to overcoming the prejudice, polarization, and attitudinal biases brought on by streamlined information diets. However, there is empirical evidence to suggest that crosscutting experiences sometimes elevate polarization—especially when individuals also have access to like-minded views and when disagreement is perceived as intense. The study sheds light on the connection by testing hypotheses about the association between crosscutting communication and affective polarization in both offline and online modalities of political communication. The empirical analyses were based on panel data from the E-DEM project covering a random sample of Spanish citizens interviewed up to three times between November 2018 and May 2019—that is, the time running up to the Spanish national election in 2019. The results suggest that individuals who reported engagement in face-to-face discussions with supporters of various parties (crosscutting discussions) during this time reported significantly lower levels of affective polarization compared to engagement in discussions with co-partisans exclusively. Online crosscutting and consensual discussion experiences, however, were linked to comparable levels of anti-out-group sentiment, suggesting that concerns about the impact of online communication being different from offline communication in general—and perhaps more harmful—may be overstated. Descriptive evidence furthermore indicates that most respondents who engaged in political discussions had experiences of discussions with both co-partisans and supporters of opposing parties rather than co-partisans exclusively. Again, this was true for offline and online communication alike. Insofar as the results translate to other contexts as well, they indicate that future efforts to explain any surges in affective polarization should primarily be focused on other areas of inquiry.
... One issue with polarization during a pandemic is that it might lead different segments of the population to arrive at different conclusions about the threat in the situation and appropriate actions. Partisans may receive different news because individuals can self-select polarized news sources or partisan 'echo chambers' 92,93 or can communicate in ways that are associated with less cross-partisan information sharing 94 . But in-person political interactions can provide more opportunity for cross-partisan communication 95 (that produce a shared understanding). ...
... Personalized machine learning algo rithms and the freedom to choose content tend to increase the likelihood of selective information exposure to previ ously unimaginable levels. Thus, many worry that social media platforms are merely becoming ideological echo chambers in which people who are strongly motivated by ego justifying, group justifying or system justifying (or system challenging) goals seek out like minded others 261,264,265 . At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that patterns of online ideological segregation resemble offline patterns of media consumption 205 , and most social media users are exposed to reasonable levels of ideological heterogeneity 206,207,257,[266][267][268] . ...
Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society but also require some level of cooperation and institutional trust. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an ‘us versus them’ mentality dominates. Despite a vast multidisciplinary literature, no coherent conceptual framework of the microlevel dynamics that increase or decrease polarization has been presented. In this Review, we provide a conceptual framework to integrate scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted. Ego-justifying and group-justifying motives lead individuals to defend their own pre-existing beliefs and those of their in-group, respectively. However, a distinct class of system-justifying motives contributes to asymmetric forms of polarization. Whereas conservative-rightist ideology is associated with valuing tradition, social order and maintenance of the status quo, liberal-leftist ideology is associated with a push for egalitarian social change. These cognitive–motivational mechanisms interact with social influence processes linked to communication source, message and channel factors, all of which might contribute to increased or decreased polarization. We conclude with a discussion of unanswered questions and ways in which our framework can be extended to the study of culture and institutions. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an ‘us versus them’ mentality dominates. In this Review, Jost et al. provide a conceptual framework that integrates scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted.
... The problem is not limited to the phenomenon of fake news, but this is an area that is particularly revealing of how information is increasingly segmented across ideological divides, so that people tend to have access only to pieces of news supported by their parties. The fact that political communication occurs mainly online, in social networks, tends to increase the effects of filter bubbles and intellectual isolation in a way that impoverishes politically relevant knowledge (Bennet 2020: 11;Chambers 2021;Lelkes et al. 2017). ...
... The effects of this sort of attachment can be seen in the pronounced affective polarization observed today (Iyengar et al., 2012;Iyengar & Westwood, 2015;Arceneaux & Vander Wielen, 2017), and especially the profound increase in negative affect for opposing partisans (Iyengar and Westwood 2015;Lelkes et al., 2017;Abramowitz & Webster, 2016;Lee et al., 2022). Over the past decade, partisans have not only viewed members of the opposing party more negatively (Iyengar et al., 2012), but they have also begun to attribute more negative stereotypes to the opposing party (Iyengar et al., 2012;Levendusky, 2018;Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016). ...
How rampant is political discrimination in the United States, and how does it compare to other sources of bias in apolitical interactions? We employ a conjoint experiment to juxtapose the discriminatory effects of salient social categories across a range of contexts. The conjoint framework enables identification of social groups’ distinct causal effects, ceteris paribus, and minimizes ‘cheap talk,’ social desirability bias, and spurious conclusions from statistical discrimination. We find pronounced discrimination along the lines of party and ideology, as well as politicized identities such as religion and sexual orientation. We also find desire for homophily along more dimensions, as well as specific out-group negativity. We also find important differences between Democrats and Republicans, with discrimination by partisans often focusing on other groups with political relevance of their own. Perhaps most striking, though, is how much discrimination emerges along political lines – both partisan and ideological. Yet, counter-stereotypic ideological labels can counter, and even erase, the discriminatory consequences of party.
... It is possible that traditional media users tend to be frequent customers of specific partisan news outlets. As these partisan media outlets increasingly convey politically tinged information and opinions, the habitual use of these outlets may reinforce in-group favoritism and out-group hostility (Lelkes et al., 2017;Stroud, 2011). In media use practice, social media users may encounter diverse views more easily on one media platform, but it could be more difficult for traditional media users to obtain information across multiple channels representing a wide range of political spectrum. ...
Although collective efforts are essential to fight COVID-19, public opinion in the United States is sharply divided by partisan attitudes and health beliefs. Addressing the concern that media use facilitates polarization, this study investigated whether social and traditional media use for COVID-19 information attenuates or reinforces existing disparities. This article focuses on two important areas where the public is highly polarized: partisan affect and vaccine attitudes. Contradicting the filter bubble claim, our survey ( n = 1106) revealed that social media use made people less polarized in both partisan affect and vaccine hesitancy. In contrast, traditional media use made people more polarized in partisan affect. These findings corroborate the growing evidence that social media provide diverse viewpoints and incidental learning.
... We know ideological and affective polarization has risen in recent years, especially in the US (Iyengar et al., 2019), and there might be links between affective polarization and social media use (Allcott et al., 2020;Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar, 2017). However, so far, no-one has sought to investigate whether politically hostile social media networks amplify politically divisive events and whether this in turn fuels polarization. ...
Political hostility and ideological polarization permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving long-term developments in ideological polarization and political hostility? Prominent theories of social media argue that social media networks are best conceptualized as echo chambers, i.e., systems insulated from external input. Contrary to this view, we demonstrate that over the course of the 2020 election year in the US, all major ebbs and flows in political hostility on the social media platform Twitter were driven by external offline events. Importantly, these events were magnified for Twitter users within the most politically hostile and least ideologically diverse networks. Accordingly, social media networks are often best conceptualized as semi-open resonance chambers that are not insulated from external events but magnify them. We demonstrate that resonance chambers facilitate event-driven hostility via feedback loops that makes Twitter both more hostile and more ideologically polarized.
... The reduction in the price of broadband can promote greater innovation and growth of the entrepreneurial culture. Mass use of broadband also has significant effects in terms of political polarization [21]. In fact, the authors analyzed internet access in the United States in the period between 2004 and 2008. ...
This study analyzes the determinants of the "Broadband Price Index" in Europe. The data used refers to 28 European countries between 2016 and 2021. The database used is the Digital, Economy, and Society Index-DESI of the European Commission. The data were analyzed using the following econometric techniques, namely Panel Data with Random Effects, Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Pooled OLS, WLS and Dynamic Panel. The value of the "Broadband Price Index" is positively associated with the DESI Index and "Connectivity", while it is negatively associated with "Fixed Broadband Take Up", "Fixed Broadband Coverage", "Mobile Broadband", "e-Government", "Advanced Skills and Development", "Integration of Digital Technology", "At Least Basic Digital Skills", "Above Basic Digital Skills", and "At Least Basic Software Skills". A cluster analysis was carried out below using the k-Means algorithm optimized with the Silhouette coefficient. The analysis revealed the existence of three clusters. Finally, an analysis of the machine learning algorithms was carried out to predict the future value of the "Broadband Price Index". The result shows that the most useful algorithm for prediction is the Artificial Neural Network-ANN, with an estimated value equal to an amount of 9.21%.
Doi: 10.28991/HEF-2022-03-01-03
Full Text: PDF
... The reduction in the price of broadband can promote greater innovation and growth of the entrepreneurial culture. Mass use of broadband also has significant effects in terms of political polarization (Lelkes, et al., 2017) . In fact, the authors analyzed internet access in the United States in the period between 2004 and 2008. ...
This article analyzes the determinants of the "Broadband Price Index" in Europe. The data used refer to 28 European countries between 2014 and 2021. The database used is the Digital, Economy and Society Index-DESI of the European Commission. The data were analyzed using the following econometric techniques, namely Panel Data with Random Effects, Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Pooled OLS, WLS and Dynamic Panel. The value of the "Broadband Price Index" is positively associated with the DESI Index, and "Connectivity" while it is negatively associated with "Fixed Broadband Take Up", "Fixed Broadband Coverage", "Mobile Broadband", "e-Government", "Advanced Skills and Development", "Integration of Digital Technology", "At Least Basic Digital Skills ", "Above Basic Digital Skills "," At Least Basic Software Skills ". A cluster analysis was carried out below using the k-Means algorithm optimized with the Silhouette coefficient. The analysis revealed the existence of three clusters. Finally, an analysis of the machine learning algorithms was carried out to predict the future value of the "Broadband Price Index". The result shows that the most useful algorithm for prediction is the Artificial Neural Network-ANN with an estimated value equal to an amount of 9.21%.
... Political campaigns increasing partisan tensions is one of the recurrent arguments in the literature on partisan polarisation (Sood & Iyengar 2016;Iyengar et al. 2019). Political campaigns make partisanship more salient (Michelitch & Utych 2018;Lelkes, Sood & Iyengar 2017) and this, in turn, is likely to generate both an increase in positive sentiments towards copartisans, as well as negative sentiments towards non-copartisans (voters of other political parties). In fact, increasing partisan affective polarisation is arguably one of the goals of negative political campaigning (Ansolabehere & Iyengar 1995;Iyengar, Sood & Lelkes 2012). ...
Previous studies have reported that political competition increases partisan affective polarisation. We test this hypothesis using the four waves of a survey on affective polarisation in Spain and a repeated measures design. Two of these waves were conducted during two electoral campaigns. This allows us to study whether in-group and out-group sentiments are affected by election proximity. Differences in sentiments towards in-group and out-group members increase with elections. However, this is mostly driven by an increase in positive sentiments towards the in-group. Elections also increase negative affects towards out-group members, but to a lesser extent. In Spain, these elections hardly affected territorial affective polarisation.
... Davis et al. (2020) investigate how different types of social information affect how firms compete through service quality. Allcott et al. (2020) find that Facebook may increase polarization and Lelkes et al. (2017) find that access to the Internet may increase polarization. Bakshy et al. (2015) study how much cross-cutting content a user sees in their Facebok's News Feed and show that agents are more likely to see content that matches their own opinions. ...
Individuals increasingly rely on social networking platforms to form opinions. However, these platforms typically aim to maximize engagement, which may not align with social good. In this paper, we introduce an opinion dynamics model where agents are connected in a social network, and update their opinions based on their neighbors' opinions and on the content shown to them by the platform. We focus on a stochastic block model with two blocks, where the initial opinions of the individuals in different blocks are different. We prove that for large and dense enough networks the trajectory of opinion dynamics in such networks can be approximated well by a simple two-agent system. The latter admits tractable analytical analysis, which we leverage to provide interesting insights into the platform's impact on the social learning outcome in our original two-block model. Specifically, by using our approximation result, we show that agents' opinions approximately converge to some limiting opinion, which is either: consensus, where all agents agree, or persistent disagreement, where agents' opinions differ. We find that when the platform is weak and there is a high number of connections between agents with different initial opinions, a consensus equilibrium is likely. In this case, even if a persistent disagreement equilibrium arises, the polarization in this equilibrium, i.e., the degree of disagreement, is low. When the platform is strong, a persistent disagreement equilibrium is likely and the equilibrium polarization is high. A moderate platform typically leads to a persistent disagreement equilibrium with moderate polarization. Lastly, more balanced and less polarized initial opinions are more likely to lead to persistent disagreement than to consensus.
... Measures of affective polarization include the presence of positive feelings towards one's in-party and negative feelings towards one's out-party, metrics of increasing social distance, and the use of stereotypes to characterize parties and their members (Iyengar et al. 2012(Iyengar et al. , 2019. Scholars point to internet penetration and partisan media (Lelkes et al. 2015), ideological polarization among elites (Webster and Abramowitz 2017), and the decline of 'cross-cutting' social identities (Mason 2015(Mason , 2018 as explanations for the rise in affective polarization in the United States. ...
How does partisan polarization in the United States affect foreign perceptions of its security commitments and global leadership? In a survey experiment fielded to 2000 adults in the United Kingdom, I demonstrate that priming respondents to think about US polarization negatively impacts their evaluations of the US-UK bilateral relationship. These impacts are stronger for the long-term, reputational consequences of polarization than for immediate security concerns. While foreign allies do not expect the United States to renege on existing security commitments, perceptions of extreme polarization make them less willing to engage in future partnerships with the United States and more skeptical of its global leadership. I find that these negative reputational consequences of polarization are driven by perceptions of preference-based, ideological polarization rather than identity-based, affective polarization. The results suggest that American allies anticipate that increasing divergence between the Republican and Democratic Party will create future uncertainty around US foreign policy.
... Davis et al. (2020) investigate how different types of social information affect how firms compete through service quality. Allcott et al. (2020) find that Facebook may increase polarization and Lelkes et al. (2017) find that access to the Internet may increase polarization. Bakshy et al. (2015) study how much cross-cutting content a user sees in their Facebok's News Feed and show that agents are more likely to see content that matches their own opinions. ...
Individuals increasingly rely on social networking platforms to form opinions. However, these platforms typically aim to maximize engagement, which may not align with social good. In this paper, we introduce an opinion dynamics model where agents are connected in a social network, and update their opinions based on their neighbors' opinions and on the content shown to them by the platform. We focus on a stochastic block model with two blocks, where the initial opinions of the individuals in different blocks are different. We prove that for large and dense enough networks the trajectory of opinion dynamics in such networks can be approximated well by a simple two-agent system. The latter admits tractable analytical analysis, which we leverage to provide interesting insights into the platform's impact on the social learning outcome in our original two-block model. Specifically, by using our approximation result, we show that agents' opinions approximately converge to some limiting opinion, which is either: consensus, where all agents agree, or persistent disagreement, where agents' opinions differ. We find that when the platform is weak and there is a high number of connections between agents with different initial opinions, a consensus equilibrium is likely. In this case, even if a persistent disagreement equilibrium arises, the polarization in this equilibrium, i.e., the degree of disagreement, is low. When the platform is strong, a persistent disagreement equilibrium is likely and the equilibrium polarization is high. A moderate platform typically leads to a persistent disagreement equilibrium with moderate polarization. Lastly, more balanced and less polarized initial opinions are more likely to lead to persistent disagreement than to consensus.
... The reduction in the price of broadband can promote greater innovation and growth of the entrepreneurial culture. Mass use of broadband also has significant effects in terms of political polarization (Lelkes, et al., 2017) . In fact, the authors analyzed internet access in the United States in the period between 2004 and 2008. ...
This article analyzes the determinants of the "Broadband Price Index" in Europe. The data used refer to 28 European countries between 2014 and 2021. The database used is the Digital, Economy and Society Index-DESI of the European Commission. The data were analyzed using the following econometric techniques, namely Panel Data with Random Effects, Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Pooled OLS, WLS and Dynamic Panel. The value of the "Broadband Price Index" is positively associated with the DESI Index, and "Connectivity" while it is negatively associated with "Fixed Broadband Take Up", "Fixed Broadband Coverage", "Mobile Broadband", "e-Government", "Advanced Skills and Development", "Integration of Digital Technology", "At Least Basic Digital Skills ", "Above Basic Digital Skills "," At Least Basic Software Skills ". A cluster analysis was carried out below using the k-Means algorithm optimized with the Silhouette coefficient. The analysis revealed the existence of three clusters. Finally, an analysis of the machine learning algorithms was carried out to predict the future value of the "Broadband Price Index". The result shows that the most useful algorithm for prediction is the Artificial Neural Network-ANN with an estimated value equal to an amount of 9.21%.
Instrumental variable (IV) strategies are widely used in political science to establish causal relationships. However, the identifying assumptions required by an IV design are demanding, and it remains challenging for researchers to assess their validity. In this paper, we replicate 67 papers published in three top journals in political science during 2010-2022 and identify several troubling patterns. First, researchers often overestimate the strength of their IVs due to non-i.i.d. errors, such as a clustering structure. Second, the most commonly used t-test for the two-stage-least-squares (2SLS) estimates often severely underestimates uncertainty. Using more robust inferential methods, we find that around 19-30% of the 2SLS estimates in our sample are underpowered. Third, in the majority of the replicated studies, the 2SLS estimates are much larger than the ordinary-least-squares estimates, and their ratio is negatively correlated with the strength of the IVs in studies where the IVs are not experimentally generated, suggesting potential violations of unconfoundedness or the exclusion restriction. To help researchers avoid these pitfalls, we provide a checklist for better practice.
After a period in which affective polarization—defined here as the difference between positive feelings toward in‐parties and negative out‐party animus—has mostly focused on the single US case, there has recently been an increase in large‐N comparative analyses and single case studies in other countries, including in the Nordic region. This study adds to this by studying and comparing affective polarization in the Nordic countries. In line with what previous comparative and single case studies have already indicated, the results show that affective polarization has tended to be higher in Sweden and Denmark than in Norway, Iceland, and Finland. The article also tracks time trends for the association between ideological distance from parties and affective party evaluations. As expected, placing parties further from oneself on the left‐right scale has been more strongly associated with party affect in Denmark and Sweden. Furthermore, the results show that there are some variations between the countries in terms of how distance from parties on other ideological dimensions than left‐right placement is associated with out‐party affect.
This article introduces a dataset on the covert use of social media to influence politics by promoting propaganda, advocating controversial viewpoints, and spreading disinformation. Influence efforts (IEs) are defined as: (i) coordinated campaigns by a state, or the ruling party in an autocracy, to impact one or more specific aspects of politics at home or in another state, (ii) through media channels, including social media, by (iii) producing content designed to appear indigenous to the target state. Our data draw on more than 1,000 media reports and 500 research articles/reports to identify IEs, track their progress, and classify their features. The data cover 78 foreign influence efforts (FIEs) and 25 domestic influence efforts (DIEs) – in which governments targeted their own citizens – against 51 different countries from 2011 through early 2021. The Influence Effort dataset measures covert information campaigns by state actors, facilitating research on contemporary statecraft.
The emergence of COVID-19 spurred the fastest development of a vaccine in history. Yet, a large proportion of Americans remain hesitant to receive it. Our paper investigates how the social networks we inhabit might explain persistent vaccine hesitancy. We argue that the COVID-19 vaccination status of respondents’ closest associates inhibits or motivates their decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. To test our argument, we conduct an original survey asking respondents a battery of questions about the people with whom individuals most frequently discuss vaccines and COVID-19. Our survey reports that individuals’ discussion networks are polarized by vaccination status. Concurrently, there is a strong association between the social network’s vaccination status and the respondent’s vaccination status. This association is so robust that partisanship does not moderate the association between discussants’ vaccination status and respondents’ vaccination status. Together, our results imply that unvaccinated individuals remain hesitant because they face reinforcing social pressure from their closest associates. The unique timing of our survey, during an unprecedented vaccination campaign against a novel disease, offers a snapshot of how relationships may affect attitudes.
Since the use of social media in election campaigns was made legal in 2013, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been widely adopted by candidates in Japan’s elections. This chapter examines how social media platforms were used in the 2021 election, looking at which candidates and parties chose to engage most heavily in online campaigning, and at the issues, policies, and narratives which the various parties’ candidates focused on in their social media messaging. LDP candidates are seen to have focused on the government’s track record and the success of the COVID-19 vaccination program, while mainstream opposition candidates’ online messaging largely focused on pocketbook and family issues. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the Twitter follower networks of both candidates and major media organizations, providing insight into the extent of affective polarization on social media during the 2021 election period.KeywordsDigital politicsSocial mediaTwitterOnline campaigningPolarization
This thesis consists of three chapters that examine from three different perspectives how diversity affects the economy. The first chapter focuses on racial discrimination in rental housing. I concentrate on Moscow's rental housing market, where landlords practice overt discrimination. Using a model with building-level fixed effects, I show that discrimination generates a racial differential in rents: non-discriminatory apartments are 4% more expensive. The second chapter focuses on competition between residents and tourists for urban amenities. Using TripAdvisor reviews, we construct panel data on tourism and consumption in Paris. We show that during the pandemic, a decline in tourism led to an increase in Parisians' satisfaction with restaurants and other amenities. The third chapter explores how contemporary social movements can broaden their base. Using super spread events as a source of plausible exogenous variation at the county level, we find that exposure to the pandemic led to an increase in the likelihood of observing BLM events online and offline. This effect is more pronounced in whiter, more affluent and suburban counties. We show that this effect is driven by higher social media take-up among non-traditional users.
Today’s information environment is drastically different from the heyday of print and broadcast, but these changes exceed the scope of researchers’ agendas. More is known now than when these technologies were in their infancy, yet efforts to understand the implications of changing communication technology for media effects have produced mixed findings, limiting progress towards cohesive and generalisable theoretical explanations. A literature review suggests one reason for this is that media effects scholarship has often neglected insights from political psychology and information processing, contributing to a lack of theoretical coherence across these bodies of work. Though research thoroughly examines directional motivations dictating media choice and exposure, it does not equally consider other cognitive biases driving choice, exposure, and processing, which can offset effects from the structural aspects of digital media. Given ample evidence that communication technology influences information processing, any viable, contemporary explanation of media effects must reconcile with these literatures.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
One of today’s most controversial and consequential issues is whether the global uptake of digital media is causally related to a decline in democracy. We conducted a systematic review of causal and correlational evidence (N = 496 articles) on the link between digital media use and different political variables. Some associations, such as increasing political participation and information consumption, are likely to be beneficial for democracy and were often observed in autocracies and emerging democracies. Other associations, such as declining political trust, increasing populism and growing polarization, are likely to be detrimental to democracy and were more pronounced in established democracies. While the impact of digital media on political systems depends on the specific variable and system in question, several variables show clear directions of associations. The evidence calls for research efforts and vigilance by governments and civil societies to better understand, design and regulate the interplay of digital media and democracy.
Our article describes how users’ decisions to share content alter the frequencies of the frame elements observed by social media peers. Changes in the frequency of distinct frame elements shape how individuals interpret, classify and define situations and events. We label this process Network Activated Frames (NAFs). We test the mechanisms behind NAF with an original image-based conjoint design that replicates network activation in three surveys. Results show that partisans share more content than nonpartisans and that their preferences differ from those of nonpartisans. Our findings show that a network of peers with cross-cutting ideological preferences may be perceived as a bubble if partisans amplify content they like at higher rates. Beginning with fully randomized probabilities, the output from our experiments is more extreme than the preferences of the median users, as partisans activate more and different frame elements than nonpartisans. We implement the experiments in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
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. Building on intergroup contact theory, the authors argue that such discussions will mitigate partisan animosity. Using an original experiment, they find strong support for this hypothesis – affective polarization falls substantially among subjects who participate in heterogeneous discussion (relative to those who participate in either homogeneous political discussion or an apolitical control). This Element also provides evidence for several of the mechanisms underlying these effects, and shows that they persist for at least one week after the initial experiment. These findings have considerable importance for efforts to ameliorate animus in the mass public, and for understanding American politics more broadly.
This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information among citizen and political actors, the connection between the mass public and political elites, and the development of policy responses to societal problems. This element discusses how digital technology has shaped these different domains, identifies areas of research consensus as well as unresolved questions, and argues that a key perspective involves issue definition, that is, how the nature of the problems raised by digital technology is subject to political contestation.
This study aims to examine the influence of Republican and Democratic partisan television news on attitudes toward candidates for president immediately following the 2016 general election. Using two waves of the 2016 American National Election Study, we examine feelings toward Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton before and after the election. Exposure to Republican partisan media did have a significant negative effect on feelings toward Hillary Clinton, even when controlling for party identification, ideology, and feelings toward Clinton before the election. Consumption of Democratic partisan television, however, had no influence on feelings toward Donald Trump. Further fragmentation and the expansion of partisan media has—and will continue to—benefit Republicans over Democrats.
En la última década, la literatura en ciencia política ha introducido un nuevo concepto denominado “polarización afectiva” para caracterizar una forma de polarización política en la que predominan actitudes de favoritismo por el propio grupo y
desprecio hacia el grupo rival. Este nuevo concepto nace en un escenario de fuerte tensión entre grupos políticos rivales en diversas democracias modernas. En este artículo, presentamos una revisión sistemática y crítica de la literatura empírica sobre polarización afectiva. El objetivo es poder realizar sugerencias metodológicas a tener en cuenta en la futura investigación en esta área. Como punto positivo, destacamos la variedad de medidas que se han utilizado para medir la polarización afectiva, desde medidas explícitas e implícitas hasta conductuales. Criticamos la ambigüedad con la que viene siendo utilizado el concepto de polarización afectiva, sugiriendo maneras de sobrepasar los problemas identificados. También señalamos la necesidad de una definición precisa de los objetos hacia los cuales las actitudes van a ser medidas. Por último, resaltamos la necesidad de mayores esfuerzos para establecer la validez convergente y discriminante del constructo de polarización afectiva.
Many contend that U.S. state parties are increasingly polarized and nationalized, meaning that they have adopted divergent positions matching their national counterparts’ positions. Such trends reflect a transformation of America's historically decentralized party system. Yet, the precise timing of these related trends—as well as the mechanisms underpinning them—remain unclear. We assess these dynamics using a novel data set of 1,783 state party platforms between 1918 and 2017. Applying tools from automated and manual content analysis, we document a dramatic divergence in the topics emphasized by Democrats and Republicans starting in the mid-1990s, just as congressional speech became polarized. During this period, cross-state differences in each party's agenda decreased and regional/sectoral issues became less prominent, suggesting tight connections between polarization, nationalization, and state agendas. We also find that innovative phrases increasingly debut in state (not national) platforms. Overall, the evidence undercuts claims of top-down polarization emanating from national party leaders in Washington, DC. Polarization at the state and federal levels coincided with the development of an integrated network of activists spanning multiple levels of the polity.
Do users tend to consume only like-minded political information online? We point to two problems with the existing knowledge about this debate. First, the measurement of media preferences by the typical means of surveys is less reliable than behavioral data. Second, most studies have analyzed only the extent of online exposure to like-minded content, not the users’ complete web-browsing repertoire. This study used both survey data and real-life browsing behavior (661,483 URLs from 15,976 websites visited by 402 participants) for the period 7 weeks prior to the 2013 Israeli national elections. The results indicate that (1) self-report measurements of ideological exposure are inflated, (2) exposure to online ideological content accounted for only 3% of total online browsing, (3) the participants’ media repertoires are very diverse with no evidence of echo chambers, and (4) in accordance with the selective exposure hypothesis, individuals on both sides are more exposed to like-minded content. The results are discussed in light of the selective exposure literature.
The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information
that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their
beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers
have recently found counter evidence of selective exposure in social media:
users are exposed to politically diverse articles. No work has looked at what
happens after exposure, particularly how individuals react to such exposure,
though. Users might well be exposed to diverse articles but share only the
partisan ones. To test this, we study partisan sharing on Facebook: the
tendency for users to predominantly share like-minded news articles and avoid
conflicting ones. We verified four main hypotheses. That is, whether partisan
sharing: 1) exists at all; 2) changes across individuals (e.g., depending on
their interest in politics); 3) changes over time (e.g., around elections); and
4) changes depending on perceived importance of topics. We indeed find strong
evidence for partisan sharing. To test whether it has any consequence in the
real world, we built a web application for BBC viewers of a popular political
program, resulting in a controlled experiment involving more than 70
individuals. Based on what they share and on survey data, we find that partisan
sharing has negative consequences: distorted perception of reality. However, we
do also find positive aspects of partisan sharing: it is associated with people
who are more knowledgeable about politics and engage more with it as they are
more likely to vote in the general elections.
Although past research has found that news exposure correlates with strong partisanship, insights are based on single-country studies. Other studies have shown that cross-national variations in news systems correlate with turnout, but have not explored partisanship. The current study fills this gap by testing the strength of the relationship between news exposure and partisanship cross-nationally. We argue that the greater the political parallelism in news systems, the stronger the correlation between news exposure and partisanship and the smaller the gaps in partisanship between those most and least educated. Multivariate analyses of the cross-national European Social Survey find empirical support for both hypotheses.
The American electorate is characterized by political polarization, and especially by increasingly negative affective responses toward opposing party members. To what extent might this be attributed to exposure to information reinforcing individuals' partisan identity versus information representing the views of partisan opponents? And is this a uniquely American phenomenon? This study uses survey data collected immediately following recent national elections in two countries, the United States and Israel, to address these questions. Results across the two nations are generally consistent, and indicate that pro- and counterattitudinal information exposure has distinct influences on perceptions of and attitudes toward members of opposing parties, despite numerous cross-cultural differences. We discuss implications in light of recent evidence about partisans' tendency to engage in selective exposure.
We discuss a method for improving causal inferences called "Coarsened Exact Matching" (CEM), and the new "Monotonie Imbalance Bounding" (MIB) class of matching methods from which CEM is derived. We summarize what is known about CEM and MIB, derive and illustrate several new desirable statistical properties of CEM,and then propose a variety of useful extensions. We show that CEM possesses a wide range of statistical properties not available in most other matching methods but is at the same time exceptionally easy to comprehend and use. We focus on the connection between theoretical properties and practical applications. We also make available easy-to-use open source software for R, Stata, and SPSS that implement all our suggestions.
Trust and reciprocity are theoretically essential to strong democracies and efficient markets. Working from the theoretical frameworks of social identity and cognitive heuristics, this study draws on dual-process models of decision making to expect (1) the trustor to infer trustworthiness from partisan stereotypes and thus to discriminate trust in favor of co-partisans and against rival partisans, but (2) the trustee to base reciprocity decisions on real information about the trustor’s deservingness rather than a partisan stereotype. So whereas partisanship is likely to trigger trust biases, the trust decision itself provides enough information to override partisan biases in reciprocity. The analysis derives from a modified trust game experiment. Overall, the results suggest partisanship biases trust decisions among partisans, and the degree of partisan trust bias is consistent with expectations from both social identity theory and cognitive heuristics. When it comes to reciprocity, however, information about the other subject’s level of trust nullifies partisan bias.
Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: the parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps a more fundamental question: has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place, and if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements over substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those – less substantively grounded – opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.
The current debate over the extent of polarization in the American mass public focuses on the extent to which partisans' policy preferences have moved. Whereas "maximalists" claim that partisans' views on policies have become more extreme over time (Abramowitz 2010), "minimalists" (Fiorina and Abrams 2009) contend that the majority of Americans remain centrist, and that what little centrifugal movement has occurred reflects sorting, i.e., the increased association between partisanship and ideology. We argue in favor of an alternative definition of polarization, based on the classic concept of social distance (Bogardus 1947). Using data from a variety of sources, we demonstrate that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents. We also find that partisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes. The more plausible account lies in the nature of political campaigns; exposure to messages attacking the out-group reinforces partisans' biased views of their opponents.
The Analysis of Broadband Demand Using Data on Willingness-to-Pay
Paul Rappoport, Temple University
Lester D. Taylor, University of Arizona
Donald J. Kridel, University of Missouri at St. Louis
Abstract
In early 2002, the Management Systems Group of Philadelphia conducted an omnibus surveyin which respondents were asked questions concerning their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for broadband access to the telecommunications network. In an initial analysis of this information [Rappoport et al. (2002b)], the authors focused on the construction of price elasticities for broadband access from using a generally overlooked procedure suggested by Cramer (1969). Price elasticities for both cable-modem and DSL access were obtained that range from an order of -3 for high willingness-to-pay (and therefore low implied penetration rates) to an order of -1 for low willingness-to-pay (and therefore high implied penetration). The present study utilizes the
framework of that study to model the survey-elicited WTP’s as a function of respondents’ income, socio-demographic characteristics, and type of Internet access (if any).
In three studies, we tested whether prejudice derives from perceived similarities and dissimilarities in political ideologies (the value-conflict hypothesis). Across three diverse samples in Study 1, conservatives had less favorable impressions than liberals of groups that were identified as liberal (e.g., African Americans, homosexuals), but more favorable impressions than liberals of groups identified as conservative (e.g., Christian fundamentalists, businesspeople). In Studies 2 and 3, we independently manipulated a target's race (European American or African American) and political attitudes (liberal or conservative). Both studies found symmetrical preferences, with liberals and conservatives each liking attitudinally similar targets more than dissimilar targets. The amount of prejudice was comparable for liberals and conservatives, and the race of the target had no effect. In all three studies, the same patterns were obtained even after controlling for individual differences on prejudice-related dimensions (e.g., system justification, social-dominance orientation, modern racism). The patterns strongly support the value-conflict hypothesis and indicate that prejudice exists on both sides of the political spectrum.
People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept "confirming" evidence at face value while subjecting "disconfirming" evidence to critical evaluation, and, as a result, draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization. To test these assumptions, 48 undergraduates supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to 2 purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones, and they reported corresponding shifts in their beliefs as the various results and procedures were presented. The net effect of such evaluations and opinion shifts was the postulated increase in attitude polarization. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article explores two hypotheses about how voters encounter information during campaigns. According to the anticipated agreement hypothesis, people prefer to hear about candidates with whom they expect to agree. The “issue publics” hypothesis posits that voters choose to encounter information on issues they consider most important personally. We tested both hypotheses by distributing a multimedia CD offering extensive information about George W. Bush and Al Gore to a representative sample of registered voters with personal computers and home Internet connections during the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign. Exposure to information was measured by tracking individuals' use of the CD. The evidence provided strong support for the issue public hypothesis and partial support for the anticipated agreement hypothesis. Republicans and conservatives preferred to access information about George Bush, but Democrats and liberals did not prefer information about Vice President Gore. No interactions appeared between these two forms of selective exposure.
We investigate the role of homophily – a tendency to interact with similar individuals–in the diffusion of political information in social networks. We develop a model predicting disproportionate exposure to like-minded information and that larger groups have more connections and are exposed to more information. To test these hypotheses, we use data on links and communications between politically-engaged Twitter users. We find that users affiliated with majority political groups, relative to the minority group, have more connections, are exposed to more information, and are exposed to information more quickly. Likewise, we find that users are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly.
We discuss a method for improving causal inferences called ‘‘Coarsened Exact Matching’’ (CEM), and the new ‘‘Monotonic Imbalance Bounding’’ (MIB) class of matching methods from which CEM is derived. We summarize what is known about CEM and MIB, derive and illustrate several new desirable statistical properties of CEM, and then propose a variety of useful extensions. We show that CEM possesses a wide range of statistical properties not available in most other matching methods but is at the same time exceptionally easy to comprehend and use. We focus on the connection between theoretical properties and practical applications. We also make available easy-to-use open source software for R, Stata, and SPSS that implement all our suggestions.
This chapter revisits the findings and conclusions reached in The Myth of the Independent Voter (1992), which shows independents in the electorate from 1952 (the first year in which the ANES asked respondents for their party identification) through 1988. Furthermore, the chapter addresses, where needed, some of the claims and concerns that still circulate regarding the large bloc of independents. It discusses the increase in the number of citizens identifying as independent, a phenomenon which began in the 1960s and is now considered a potential threat to the current American party system, which has been seen as a fundamental, long-term influence on Americans' political attitudes and behavior, and as the single most important predictor of the vote.
Renowned political scientist Alan I. Abramowitz presents a groundbreaking argument that the most important divide in American politics is not between left and right but rather between citizens who are politically engaged and those who are not. It is the engaged members of the public, he argues, who most closely reflect the ideals of democratic citizenship-but this is also the group that is most polarized. Polarization at the highest levels of government, therefore, is not a sign of elites' disconnection from the public but rather of their responsiveness to the more politically engaged parts of it. Though polarization is often assumed to be detrimental to democracy, Abramowitz concludes that by presenting voters with clear choices, polarization can serve to increase the public's interest and participation in politics and strengthen electoral accountability.
The media environment is changing. Today in the United States, the average viewer can choose from hundreds of channels, including several twenty-four hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on iPods, and online; it has become a ubiquitous and unavoidable reality in modern society. The purpose of this book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and new survey data, it shows how changes in the media environment reverberate through the political system, affecting news exposure, political learning, turnout, and voting behavior.
Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Rush Limbaugh Show, National Public Radio-a list of available political media sources could continue without any apparent end. This book investigates how people navigate these choices. It asks whether people are using media sources that express political views matching their own, a behavior known as partisan selective exposure. By looking at newspaper, cable news, news magazine, talk radio, and political website use, this book offers a look to-date at the extent to which partisanship influences our media selections. Using data from numerous surveys and experiments, the results provide broad evidence about the connection between partisanship and news choices. This book also examines who seeks out likeminded media and why they do it. Perceptions of partisan biases in the media vary-sources that seem quite biased to some don't seem so biased to others. These perceptual differences provide insight into why some people select politically likeminded media-a phenomenon that is democratically consequential. On one hand, citizens may become increasingly divided from using media that coheres with their political beliefs. In this way, partisan selective exposure may result in a more fragmented and polarized public. On the other hand, partisan selective exposure may encourage participation and understanding. Likeminded partisan information may inspire citizens to participate in politics and help them to organize their political thinking. But, ultimately, the partisan use of niche news has some troubling effects. It is vital that we think carefully about the implications both for the conduct of media research and, more broadly, for the progress of democracy.
Since Stigler's (1961) seminal paper, models of costly search have been at the heart of many economic models trying to explain imperfectly competitive behavior in product and labor markets. The theoretical literature typically models consumer search in two ways. Following Stigler's original model, a strand of literature assumes fixed sample size search behavior, where consumers sample a fixed number of stores and choose to buy the lowest priced alternative.1 A much larger strand of the literature, starting with McCall (1970) and Mortensen (1970), points out that consumers cannot commit to a fixed sample size search strategy in instances where the expected marginal benefit of an extra search exceeds the marginal cost. Thus, this literature argues that a sequential search model provides a better description of actual consumer search.
This paper examines the effect of the introduction of broadband Internet on voting and campaign donations in the 2000s. To identify the effect of broadband, I use an instrumental variable strategy based on geographic terrain attributes which affected the cost of building cable infrastructure. I find that broadband has led to a large increase in voter turnout in presidential elections, as well as an increase in the total amount donated to political campaigns. Consistent with the hypothesis that Democrats have a stronger online presence, I also find a large effect on Democratic vote share in presidential elections. Evidence suggests the existence of both direct and indirect channels for the broadband effect. In particular, I find that broadband availability is associated with greater political knowledge, an increase in online (but not offline) donations, and the promotion of liberal values.
Scholars have argued that online social networks and personalized web search increase ideological segregation. We investigate the impact of these potentially polarizing channels on news consumption by examining web browsing histories for 50,000 U.S.-located users who regularly read online news. We find that individuals indeed exhibit substantially higher segregation when reading articles shared on social networks or returned by search engines, a pattern driven by opinion pieces. However, these polarizing articles from social media and web search constitute only 2% of news consumption. Consequently, while recent technological changes do increase ideological segregation, the magnitude of the effect is limited.
Our main argument is that ordinary Americans are increasingly polarized, but not in their policy preferences or their ideology. Decades of research suggest that ordinary Americans do not tend to hold their policy preferences strongly (Converse 1964) and are “innocent of ideology” to borrow Herbert McClosky’s (1964) wonderful turn of phrase. Looking for polarization in Americans’ policy preferences or their ideological predispositions is almost sure not to turn up much (but see Abramowitz 2010 on health care). Rather, our focus is on the effects of a very recent, but different, development in public opinion: the polarization of trust in government. This form of polarization is a central support to the gridlocked politics that contemporary Washington produces. The public did not create polarization in Washington, but it does allow it to persist.
When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit, and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on nonpolitical judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.
In light of a recent exchange between Prior (2013a) and Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013), we evaluate the new American National Election Study program-count measures of news exposure using a unique dataset that tracks self-reports as well as actual exposure to news collected via passive tracking devices. We bring these data to bear on concerns raised by Prior (2013a) about the construct and convergent validity of the new ANES measures. Our results add nuance to previous findings showing respondents’ propensity to overreport exposure to news, and also demonstrate that on average, self-reported measures reflect relative levels of exposure quite well. Additionally, we show that the more unique news programs a person watches, the more total time he or she is exposed to political news. Very few people watch only one program but watch it repeatedly. The data also reveal an increase in the number of programs watched leading up to election day, and a concomitant increase in the amount of time per capita spent with political news as elections approach. We conclude, however, that the program-count measure is not without its weaknesses. Shortening the list of programs affects construct validity by introducing noise into the low end of the scale. Expanding the list of programs in the survey to include local news and special reports will improve fidelity at the low end of this new measure.
The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in whether such outlets polarize viewers. I draw on theories of motivated reasoning to explain why partisan media polarize viewers, why these programs affect some viewers much more strongly than others, and how long these effects endure. Using a series of original experiments, I find strong support for my theoretical expectations, including the argument that these effects can still be detected several days postexposure. My results demonstrate that partisan media polarize the electorate by taking relatively extreme citizens and making them even more extreme. Though only a narrow segment of the public watches partisan media programs, partisan media's effects extend much more broadly throughout the political arena.
In “The Challenge of Measuring Media Exposure: Reply to Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz,” Markus Prior suggests that scholars should avoid using a new method of measuring exposure to political television that we evaluated in a recent article published in the American Journal of Political Science. We respond to each of his criticisms, concluding that although no measurement approach is without its flaws, scholars should always use the best approach that is available at any given point in time.
Political communication research has long been plagued by inaccurate self-reports of media exposure. Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013)13.
Dilliplane , S. ,
Goldman , S. and
Mutz , D. 2013. Televised exposure to politics: New measures for a fragmented media environment. American Journal of Political Science, 57: 236–248. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references propose a new survey-based measure of “televised exposure to politics” that avoids some of the features that lead to self-report error and that has already been adopted by the American National Election Study. Yet the validity of the new measure has not been independently tested. An analysis reveals several weaknesses. First, construct validity of the new measure is low because it does not attempt to measure the amount of exposure to news programs, news channels, or news overall. Second, its convergent validity is poor by several different criteria. For example, the new measure shows barely any increase in news exposure as the 2008 presidential election approached. Third, the authors' criterion for predictive validity is neither necessary nor sufficient. Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz are right that measuring the media exposure of survey respondents in a valid and reliable way is critical for progress in political communication research. But given the inability of many respondents to report their own exposure, it is necessary to monitor the media use of survey respondents automatically.
How has the rise of partisan media outlets changed how citizens perceive the other party? In particular, does watching partisan news sources make citizens dislike and distrust the other party? Drawing on social identity theory, I explain how the slanted presentation of the news on partisan outlets leads viewers to perceive the other party more negatively, to trust them less, and to be less supportive of bipartisanship. Using a series of original experiments, I find strong support for my arguments. I conclude by discussing the normative and empirical implications of these findings.[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): full details of the experiments, including descriptions of the samples, protocol, and text of the stimuli, results of manipulation checks, the replication of experiment 2 described in the text, and additional statistical results.]
I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple “running tally” of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of “objective” politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on “the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.”
Political observers of all types often express concerns that Americans are dangerously polarized on political issues and are, in part due to the availability of opinionated niche news programming (e.g., ideological cable, radio, and Internet news sources), developing more entrenched political positions. However, these accounts often overlook the fact that the rise of niche news has been accompanied by the expansion of entertainment options and the ability to screen out political news altogether. We examine the polarizing effects of opinionated political talk shows by integrating the Elaboration Likelihood Model of attitude development into our own theoretical model of selective media exposure. We employ a novel experimental design that gives participants agency to choose among news and entertainment programming by including treatments that allow participants to select the programming they view. The results from two studies show that ideological shows do indeed have the power to polarize political attitudes, especially among individuals who possess strong motivations to craft counterarguments. However, the polarizing force of cable news is diminished considerably when individuals are given the option to tune out.
Little is known about the American public’s policy preferences at the level of Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and local municipalities. In this article, we overcome the limited sample sizes that have hindered previous research by jointly scaling the policy preferences of 275,000 Americans based on their responses to policy questions. We combine this large dataset of Americans’ policy preferences with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, and large city. We show that our estimates outperform previous measures of citizens’ policy preferences. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels. We demonstrate the utility of these estimates through applications of our measures to examine representation in state legislatures and city governments.
This paper sheds light on the links between media and political polarization by looking at the introduction of broadcast TV in the US. We provide causal evidence that broadcast TV decreased the ideological extremism of US representatives. We then show that exposure to radio was associated with decreased polarization. We interpret this result by using a simple framework that identifies two channels linking media environment to politicians' incentives to polarize. First, the ideology effect: changes in the media environment may affect the distribution of citizens' ideological views, with politicians moving their positions accordingly. Second, the motivation effect: the media may affect citizens' political motivation, changing the ideological composition of the electorate and thereby impacting elite polarization while mass polarization is unchanged. The evidence on polarization and turnout is consistent with a prevalence of the ideology effect in the case of TV, as both of them decreased. Increased turnout associated with radio exposure is in turn consistent with a role for the motivation effect.
What effect did the Internet have on the 2008 U.S. presidential elections? According to anecdotal evidence, the internet is said to have played a key role: the Obama campaignâs online fundraising arm brought in a record $500 billion in small individual donations; and the campaignâs heavy use of social media purportedly contributed to the highest rate of youth turnout since voting was extended to 18-year-olds. We test these assertions exploiting geographic discontinuities along state borders with different right-of-way laws, determining the cost of building new infrastructure. We find that areas with higher internet growth are more likely to swing to the Democratic presidential nominee and are more likely to provide small donations to the Democratic Party.
In recent decades, the diversity of Americans’ news choices has expanded substantially. This paper examines whether access to an ideologically distinctive news source — the Fox News cable channel — influences vote intentions. It also considers whether any such effect is concentrated among those likely to agree with Fox’s viewpoint. To test these possibilities with individual-level data, we identify local Fox News availability for 22,592 respondents to the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey. For the population overall, we find an average treatment effect indistinguishable from zero. Yet we also find a sizable effect of Fox access on the vote intentions of Republicans and pure independents, a finding that is bolstered by placebo tests. Contrary to fears about pervasive media influence, but consistent with an older tradition of media scholarship, access to an ideologically distinctive media source reinforces the loyalties of co-partisans without influencing out-partisans.
Many studies of media effects use self-reported news exposure as their key independent variable without establishing its validity. Motivated by anecdotal evidence that people's reports of their own media use can differ considerably from independent assessments, this study examines systematically the accuracy of survey-based self-reports of news exposure. I compare survey estimates to Nielsen estimates, which do not rely on self-reports. Results show severe overreporting of news exposure. Survey estimates of network news exposure follow trends in Nielsen ratings relatively well, but exaggerate exposure by a factor of 3 on average and as much as eightfold for some demographics. It follows that apparent media effects may arise not because of differences in exposure, but because of unknown differences in the accuracy of reporting exposure.
The glut of media coverage prior to a presidential election requires individuals to selectively expose themselves to some messages and not others. The study involves a two-session online quasi-experiment with 205 participants that was conducted before the 2008 presidential election. Hypotheses on confirmation bias and information utility driving selective exposure prior to an election are tested. Results confirm that information utility can override a confirmation bias and motivate exposure if a government change is likely and the favored party is likely to lose the election. Moreover, participants with frequent habitual online news use do not exhibit a confirmation bias. However, participants whose favored party was likely to win the election and participants with infrequent online news consumption show a significant confirmation bias.
For many research purposes, scholars need reliable and valid survey measures of the extent to which people have been exposed to various kinds of political content in mass media. Nonetheless, good measures of media exposure, and of exposure to political television in particular, have proven elusive. Increasingly fragmented audiences for political television have only made this problem more severe. To address these concerns, we propose a new way of measuring exposure to political television and evaluate its reliability and predictive validity using three waves of nationally representative panel data collected during the 2008 presidential campaign. We find that people can reliably report the specific television programs they watch regularly, and that these measures predict change over time in knowledge of candidate issue positions, a much higher standard of predictive validity than any other measure has met to date.
This essay examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates. Congress and some newer media outlets have added more partisan messages to a continuing supply of mostly balanced news. Although political attitudes of most Americans have remained fairly centrist, evidence points to some polarization among the politically involved. Proliferation of media choices lowered the share of less interested, less partisan voters and thereby made elections more partisan. But evidence for a causal link between more partisan messages and changing attitudes or behaviors is mixed at best. Measurement problems hold back research on partisan selective exposure and its consequences. Ideologically one-sided news exposure may be largely confined to a small, but highly involved and influential segment of the population. There is no firm evidence that partisan media are making ordinary Americans more partisan. Expected final...
We show that the demand for news varies with the perceived affinity of the news organization to the consumer’s political preferences. In an experimental setting, conservatives and Republicans preferred to read news reports attributed to Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR. Democrats and liberals exhibited exactly the opposite syndrome—dividing their attention equally between CNN and NPR, but avoiding Fox News. This pattern of selective exposure based on partisan affinity held not only for news coverage of controversial issues but also for relatively ‘‘soft’’ subjects such as crime and travel. The tendency to select news based on anticipated agreement was also strengthened among more politically engaged partisans. Overall, these results suggest that the further proliferation of new media and enhanced media choices may contribute to the further polarization of the news audience.
This book is "primarily a collation of the findings of published research… . Part I deals with mass communication as an agent of persuasion… . Part II deals with the effects of specific kinds of media content." A new orientation is suggested: the "Phenomenistic" approach which "is in essence a shift away from the tendency to regard mass communication as a necessary and sufficient cause of audience effects, toward a view of the media as influences, working amid other influences, in a total situation." The following generalizations are central to organizing the research findings: (a) mass communication by itself does not act as a necessary and suficient cause of audience effects and (b) mass communication typically reinforces existing conditions, rather than changing them. (270 ref.) From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:1GI02K. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The emergence of the Internet made health information, which previously was almost exclusively available to health professionals, accessible to the general public. Access to health information on the Internet is likely to affect individuals' health care related decisions. The aim of this analysis is to determine how health information that people obtain from the Internet affects their demand for health care. I use a novel data set, the U.S. Health Information National Trends Survey (2003-07), to answer this question. The causal variable of interest is a binary variable that indicates whether or not an individual has recently searched for health information on the Internet. Health care utilization is measured by an individual's number of visits to a health professional in the past 12 months. An individual's decision to use the Internet to search for health information is likely to be correlated to other variables that can also affect his/her demand for health care. To separate the effect of Internet health information from other confounding variables, I control for a number of individual characteristics and use the instrumental variable estimation method. As an instrument for Internet health information, I use U.S. state telecommunication regulations that are shown to affect the supply of Internet services. I find that searching for health information on the Internet has a positive, relatively large, and statistically signific