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.
Resumen
Los Medios Rojos, los Medios Azules: La Evidencia de la Selectividad Ideológica en el Uso de los Medios
Mostramos que la demanda de noticias varía con la percepción de la afinidad con las organizaciones de noticias en las preferencias políticas del consumidor. En un ambiente experimental, conservadores y Republicanos prefirieron leer reportes de noticias atribuidos a la cadena de noticias Fox y evitaron las noticias de CNN y NPR. Los Demócratas y liberales exhibieron el síndrome exactamente opuesto – dividiendo su atención igualmente entre CNN y NPR, pero evitando las noticias de la cadena Fox. Esta pauta selectiva de exposición basada en la afinidad partidaria es sostenida no solo con respecto a la cobertura de noticias de hechos controversiales, sino también con respecto a materias relativamente “blandas” tales como el crimen y el viaje. La tendencia a seleccionar noticias basadas en un acuerdo anticipado fue aumentada también entre los partidarios políticamente más comprometidos. En general, los resultados sugieren que la mayor proliferación de los nuevos medios y las opciones mejoradas de los medios pueden contribuir a una mayor polarización de las audiencias de noticias.
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Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers ...of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.
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.
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Deliberation is widely believed to enhance democracy by helping to refine the ‘public will’, moving its participants' policy attitudes closer to their ‘full-consideration’ policy attitudes – those ...they would hypothetically hold with unlimited information, to which they gave unlimited reflection. Yet there have also been claims that the social dynamics involved generally ‘homogenize’ attitudes (decreasing their variance), ‘polarize’ them (moving their means toward the nearer extreme), or engender ‘domination’ (moving their overall means toward those of the attitudes held by the socially advantaged) – attitude changes that may often be away from the participants' full-consideration attitudes and may thus distort rather than refine the public will. This article uses 2,601 group-issue pairs in twenty-one Deliberative Polls to examine these claims. Reassuringly, the results show no routine or strong homogenization, polarization, or domination. What little pattern there is suggests some faint homogenization, but also some faint moderation (as opposed to polarization) and opposition (as opposed to domination) – all as is to be expected when the outside-world forces shaping pre-deliberation attitudes are slightly more centrifugal than centripetal. The authors lay out a theoretical basis for these expectations and interpretations and probe the study's results, highlighting, among other things, deliberation's role in undoing outside-world effects on pre-deliberation attitudes and the observed homogenization's, polarization's, and domination's dependence on deliberative design.
In recent years, Twitter emerged as an important news driver as most major news organizations now provide newsfeeds via Twitter. We classified 34 South Korean news outlets based on the pattern of ...co-following among 709,586 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 1,811 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that partisan and generational selectivity sharply polarizes news following on Twitter, suggesting that Twitter is likely to reinforce the existing political divisions in society by reducing the likelihood of chance encounters with the disagreeable views. (Author abstract)
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In recent years, Twitter emerged as an important news driver as most major news organizations now provide newsfeeds via Twitter. We classified 34 South Korean news outlets based on the pattern of ...co-following among 709,586 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 1,811 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that partisan and generational selectivity sharply polarizes news following on Twitter, suggesting that Twitter is likely to reinforce the existing political divisions in society by reducing the likelihood of chance encounters with the disagreeable views.
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This paper demonstrates that citizens in seven advanced industrialized democracies generally oppose more open immigration policies, but stand ready to admit individual immigrants. Using an ...experimental design, we demonstrate the applicability of the "person-positivity bias" to immigration and investigate the effects of economic and cultural "deservingness" on evaluations of individual immigrants. Our results show that immigrants from professional backgrounds elicit higher levels of support than unskilled workers. The bias against unskilled workers is enlarged among immigrants accompanied by families. In comparison with occupational status and the number of family dependents, the target immigrant's cultural attributes—as measured by Middle Eastern nationality and Afrocentric appearance—prove relatively inconsequential as criteria for evaluating immigrants.
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Online social media such as Twitter are widely used for mining public opinions and sentiments on various issues and topics. The sheer volume of the data generated and the eager adoption by the ...online-savvy public are helping to raise the profile of online media as a convenient source of news and public opinions on social and political issues as well. Due to the uncontrollable biases in the population who heavily use the media, however, it is often difficult to measure how accurately the online sphere reflects the offline world at large, undermining the usefulness of online media. One way of identifying and overcoming the online-offline discrepancies is to apply a common analytical and modeling framework to comparable data sets from online and offline sources and cross-analyzing the patterns found therein. In this paper we study the political spectra constructed from Twitter and from legislators' voting records as an example to demonstrate the potential limits of online media as the source for accurate public opinion mining, and how to overcome the limits by using offline data simultaneously.
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Abstract
The effectiveness of public diplomacy is now increasingly the subject of scientific measurement and testing by researchers in the field of International Relations. While there are variety of ...empirical efforts to uncover the power of public diplomacy, extant studies have mostly focused on the activities initiated by the ministries in charge of external relations. In this article, rather than external relations ministries and agencies, we focus on the effectiveness of public diplomacy by the military. Specifically, we argue that figures, pictures and indeed videos created by military forces have power in changing perceptions among the receivers of the information. In this particular study, we show that a 38 second video made by the US military induces positive feelings for cooperation which would otherwise be difficult to sustain between South Korea and Japan — two countries which have suffered highly fractious relations, yet which are indispensable allies to the US in countering the rising threat from North Korea.
With the rise of networked media such as Twitter, celebrities' ability to speak on policy matters directly to the public has become amplified. We investigate the political implications of celebrity ...activism on Twitter by estimating the political ideology of thirty-four South Korean news outlets and fourteen political celebrities based on the co-following pattern among 1,868,587 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 11,953 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that celebrity following on Twitter is ideologically skewed; a vast majority of Korean Twitter users following politically influential celebrities are liberal. Additionally, survey results show that political celebrities are more likely to attract those lacking the ability to process one-sided information in a balanced manner.
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