Research has shown a correlation between votes for populist parties and the belief that vaccines are not important or effective. More recent investigations in the United States and France have ...similarly shown that attitudes toward the COVID‐19 vaccine have been politicized. In this article, we show a similar pattern analyzing survey data from Norway, a country relatively mildly hit by the pandemic and characterized by high trust and a consensual political culture. We find that refusal to vaccinate is associated with right‐wing ideological constraint, even when considering a wide array of control variables (e.g., lack of confidence, complacency), and sociodemographic characteristics. The results imply that vaccine refusal latch onto established political cleavages, particularly among the most ideologically consistent. Thus, polarization in the form of increasing ideological constraint may represent a mounting challenge for vaccine uptake, suggesting that vaccine communication should go beyond “explaining the science” and factor in ideology.
The well-known "high-choice news avoidance thesis" and the alternative "network structure perspective" stipulate somewhat conflicting expectations about news consumption in today's digital media ...systems. Based on annual survey data from Norway, the article examines news avoidance from 1997-2016, a period when digitalization processes transformed the media environment. Results show that news avoidance increased only marginally. The decrease in use of traditional media is largely compensated for by online news. However, news avoidance is increasingly polarized along educational lines, and it is unclear to what degree online news consumption equals traditional news media consumption in qualitative terms.
Ethnic diversity has been posed as a threat to social capital, but results from existing research are inconclusive. This study takes as its starting point that different aspects of social capital may ...be influenced differently by ethnic diversity and uses one specific welfare state context – Norway – to explore such variations. Analysing an original dataset, nine different measures are used to explore three dimensions of social capital in 61 communities in Norway, amongst the majority population and residents with immigrant background. The results suggest, first, a differentiated impact of ethnic heterogeneity on trust. Ethnic diversity is negatively associated with spatially bounded forms of trust, but not with generalized trust. Second, a negative association with traditional forms of voluntarism is found – albeit this latter relationship is much weaker than the former. Third, the results suggest that these relationships are fairly similar across different (immigrant) groups. Although residents with immigrant background typically express lower levels of generalized trust than the majority population, the relative differences between residents living in diverse or homogeneous communities are limited. Given its strong institutions Norway could be seen as a least likely case for studying the impact of ethnic diversity on social capital. On the one hand, effects are more limited than what has been found in studies from the United States. On the other hand, the fact that effects are found on community trust and volunteering indicates that this type of societal model can indeed be affected by ethnic diversification.
Acts of terror lead to both a rise of an extended sense of fear that goes beyond the physical location of the attacks and to increased expressions of online hate. In this longitudinal study, we ...analyzed dynamics between the exposure to online hate and the fear of terrorism after the Paris attacks in November 13, 2015. We hypothesized that exposure to online hate is connected to a perceived Zeitgeist of fear (i.e., collective fear). In turn, the perceived Zeitgeist of fear is related to higher personal fear of terrorism both immediately after the attacks and a year later. Hypotheses were tested using path modeling and panel data (N = 2325) from Norway, Finland, Spain, France, and the United States a few weeks after the Paris attacks in November 2015 and again a year later in January 2017. With the exception of Norway, exposure to online hate had a positive association with the perceived Zeitgeist of fear in all our samples. The Zeitgeist of fear was correlated with higher personal fear of terrorism immediately after the attacks and one year later. We conclude that online hate content can contribute to the extended sense of fear after the terrorist attacks by skewing perceptions of social climate.
Emotions, such as anger and fear, have been shown to influence people’s political behavior. However, few studies link emotions specifically to how people debate political issues and seek political ...information online. In this article, we examine how anger and fear are related to politics-oriented digital behavior, attempting to bridge the gap between the thus far disconnected literature on political psychology and the digital media. Based on survey data, we show that anger and fear are connected to distinct behaviors online. Angry people are more likely to engage in debates with people having both similar and opposing views. They also seek out information confirming their views more frequently. Anxious individuals, by contrast, tend to seek out information contradicting their opinions. These findings reiterate predictions made in the extant literature concerning the role of emotions in politics. Thus, we argue that anger reinforces echo chamber dynamics and trench warfare dynamics in the digital public sphere, while fear counteracts these dynamics.
Makt- og demokratiutredningen konkluderte pessimistisk når det gjaldt borgernes fremtidige mulighet til å delta i demokratiet utenfor valgkanalen og få gjennomslag overfor det politiske systemet. ...Problemet besto i en svekkelse av sivilsamfunnet som demokratisk infrastruktur, grunnet forvitringen av folkebevegelsesmodellen og en individualisering av deltagelse. I denne artikkelen diskuterer vi utredningens analyser og konklusjoner i lys av eksisterende forskning. Vi tar et bredere perspektiv enn det utredningen gjorde og inkluderer både det organiserte sivilsamfunnet og offentligheten som kanaler for deltagelse og innflytelse. Omdreiningspunktet for analysen er digitalisering av kommunikasjon, og hvordan det har påvirket denne helheten. De siste 20 årene har det organiserte sivilsamfunnet væ rt preget av vekst og pluralisering, med styrkede muligheter både til mobilisering og til å påvirke politikken fra ulike posisjoner, delvis understøttet av digitaliseringen. Samtidig ser vi et nytt potensiale for deltagelse og mobilisering for borgerne gjennom den digitale offentligheten. Digitaliseringen reiser likevel et sett dilemmaer knyttet representasjon, muligheten for å forme kollektive synspunkter og til å få varig gjennomslag for politiske løsninger nedenfra, gitt den spontane og episodiske mobiliseringen den legger til rette for.
Artikkelen undersøker forklaringer på etterlevelse av råd om sosial distansering under Covid-19-pandemien i den norske befolkningen, med vekt på tillit, følelser og sosiale normer. I tråd med ...teoretiske forventninger er tillit til myndighetene viktig for etterlevelse av råd. Den sosiale tilliten mellom mennesker ser derimot ut til å ha vært svakt negativt assosiert med etterlevelse. Også det å føle frykt eller håp i tilknytning til pandemien, og oppfatninger om at andre personer i ens sosiale nettverk også etterlever smittevernråd, bidrar til å forklare sosial distansering. Funnene er i tråd med hovedtrekkene i den internasjonale forskningen fra pandemien og viser at de samme forklaringene som er funnet i andre land, også gjør seg gjeldende her. Analysene er basert på longitudinelle surveydata i fire runder i perioden mars 2020 – januar 2022.
This article examines how the use of social media for news affects citizens' knowledge about politics and current affairs. We employ a two-dimensional perspective on political knowledge and ...investigate how factual political knowledge, confidence in that knowledge, and misinformation, understood as the mismatch between factual political knowledge and confidence in knowledge, are related to social media news consumption. While earlier studies have suggested a negative relationship between social media news consumption and factual knowledge, there are indications that social media use may give people a general sense of being informed, even when they are not. Such general subjective knowledge might, however, differ from confidence in retrieved facts. Drawing on a two-wave panel study from Norway, we find evidence of a negative relationship between social media news consumption and both dimensions of knowledge. Notably, however, we do not find that social media news use leads to confidence in incorrect beliefs, suggesting that the digital media environment produces an uninformed, but not an overconfident, misinformed news audience.
This study examines the role of digital media in civic and political engagement, specifically the respective roles of websites vs. social media in relation to volunteering. The study uses ...four-country (United States, United Kingdom, France, and Canada) survey data collected in 2019 and 2021 (n = 12,359). For both types of volunteering, we find that organizations' websites are more strongly correlated with volunteering compared to following organizations on social media. We replicate this finding across multiple countries, two types of analysis, and volunteering for civic and political organizations. Our findings suggest that the informational role of websites is of greater importance than the creation of quasi-membership ties inherent to social media when it comes to mobilizing volunteers. However, engaging in both online activities has the strongest relationship with volunteering, suggesting a need for multi-method communication strategy. This finding is important with respect to developing communication strategies in civic and political groups.
This paper examines how the use of social media affects participation in offline demonstrations. Using individual web survey data from Norway, we ask whether social media usage serves to re-affirm or ...transcend socioeconomic divides in participation. In addition to data on demonstration participation in general, we also use the data on the Rose Marches that were organized after the 22/7 terror events as a critical case. Our results show that the type of participant mobilized via the social media is characterized by lower socioeconomic status and younger age than those mobilized via other channels. We also show that connections to information structures through social media exert a strong and independent effect on mobilization. Our findings thus appear to corroborate the mobilization thesis: social media represent an alternative structure alongside mainstream media and well-established political organizations and civil society that recruit in different ways and reach different segments of the population.
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