Media

Question 1

Farrell 2012

Answer 1

The consequences of the internet for politics

Thesis: the three primary effects of the internet are homophilous sorting, the lowering of transaction costs, and preference falsification/ Homophily is the most important effect.

The ‘internet’ is not homogenous, but includes a bundle of different platforms and causal mechanisms.

Homophilous sorting: We know that clustering happens, but less about the consequences of clustering- while Sunstein thinks it will make individuals more inward looking and extreme, Hargittai et al 2008 find that genuine political debate occurs across clusters, and polarisation seems not to increase over time.

Similar to Prior, the internet has produced a broad population that’s exposed to a broad variety of online sources, as well as a more specific and highly politically aware subgroup that preferentially seeks out partisan information.

Lowering transaction costs: might facilitate collective action (particularly decentralised forms), allow for groups with similar interests to form more easily, or incentivise actors to engage in cheap but showy forms of politics,

Preference falsification: people may be more able /not/ to falsify preferences in auth regimes. But given the threat of online backlash more controversial activists will often falsify their preferences- this may deter future controversial activism.

It’s therefore good for democratisation prospects- facilitated the AS.

When reading online one is likely to look at articles that a) one agrees with, and b) that are more sensational, clickbaity, low information.

Question 2

Prior 2007

Answer 2

Cable television and polarisation

Thesis: the spread of cable television sorted between those who were interested in politics and tended to move toward strongly partisan news sources and those who were not and moved to channels with no political content.

TV news became dominated by the tastes of partisans.

Lawrence et al 2010: similar effect for consumers of political blogs. (from Farrell)

Question 3

Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010

Answer 3

Thesis: contra Sunstein, both the Internet and traditional media are better at exposing people to dissenting points of view than are offline encounters via personal relationships. Even intense partisans are regularly exposed to other points of view online.

Question 4

Guess 2021

Answer 4

Thesis: most people across the political spectrum have relatively moderate media diets, about a quarter of which consist of mainstream news websites and portals. But there’s a small group of partisans who account for a disproportionate amount of partisan traffic.

Most people aren’t looking at news (only 7-9% of web visits are hard news), and even when they are it isn’t usually political news.

Question 5

Mutz and Reeves 2005

Answer 5

Video malaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust

Thesis: people like uncivil discourse, but this leads them to become less trusting of politicians and govt and less engaged.

Lecture: People also like negative news, even when they say they don’t (Trussler et. al.).

Question 6

Luskin 1990

Answer 6

Causal direction problems: interest, media consumption, and knowledge.

From lecture: could be that interested people consume more media and become more knowledgeable. Could be that people who consume more media are more knowledgeable and interested. Could be that people who are more interested become more knowledgeable and consume more media

Effect on acquiring knowledge: ‘The estimates suggest that interest and intelligence, representing motivation and ability, have major effects, but that education and media exposure, the big informational variables, do not’. But unclear that their results on education hold water.

Question 7

Lazarfeld et. al. 1944

Answer 7

People tend to seek out stories consistent with their prior attitudes, and prior partisanship in particular. The media reinforce these partisan choices, and one suppresses and distorts facts that detract from one’s views.
The people who were strongest partisans used to consume the most news. Esp because non-partisans find partisan media sources too biased and partisan, and get annoyed by the coverage.

Lect: Online news makes this more likely, thus a new era of minimal effects

Question 8

Chong and Druckman 2007

Answer 8

Green belt experiment. Suggests that e.g. among existing environmentalists, whether they get a pro-economics or pro-environment frame affects whether they want green belt protection

Frame strength depends on whether the value is available in mind (e.g., whether people connect a value such as civil liberties to a hate group rally), accessible in mind (e.g., whether civil liberties actually come to mind), and applicable (e.g., whether the value of civil liberties is a compelling consideration with regard to the rally).

When frames come from more credible frames they have a much greater weight (e.g. a major local newspaper as opposed to a high school newspaper, when each discusses whether a hate group should be allowed to rally)

Where people experience competing frames they often cancel out (as in a competitive media environment)

Question 9

Zaller 1992

Answer 9

Implications: 1. people that don’t pay much attention to news aren’t going to change their opinions (a substantial portion of the popn). 2. People who are politically aware and so already have strong opinions aren’t going to accept messages that conflict with those opinions. 3. People who are politically aware and already have lots of opinions will be less influenced by any one opinion that they receive.

People have to receive, happen to not be strong partisans, and then accept the message, to change views.

Among some people, this not only doesn’t change views, but moves people to extremes.

1. Only extremists take in a lot of biased news
2. This makes those extremists yet more extreme

Four axioms:
1. Reception Axiom: The greater a person’s level of cognitive
engagement with an issue, the more likely he or she is to be
exposed to and comprehend - in a word, to receive - political
messages concerning that issue.
2. Resistance Axiom: People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and their predispositions.
3. Accessibility Axiom: The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related considerations from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use.
4. Response Axiom: Individuals answer survey questions by
averaging across the considerations that are immediately
salient or accessible to them.

Counter-model: instead of people storing information and then evaluating it when asked their opinion they may keep a running tally of their impressions of someone or something—an on-line model (e.g. Lodge et al. 1989). This is more likely to occur for political sophisticates.

Question 10

Kahneman

Answer 10

Thinking fast and slow

○ There is a distinction in psychology/behavioural econ “between the automatic, rapid, and effortless form of thought known as System 1 or type‐1 processing (henceforth S1), and the controlled, explicit and sequential form of thought known as System 2 or type‐2 processing (S2)”p243
§ When we recall something from short term memory, it’s usually using S1 and it’s only when questioned on it that we use S2 to verify
§ When we’re asked what 5x11 is we can answer quickly using S1 or ponder this more slowly using S2

Question 11

Puglisi and Snyder 2011

Answer 11

Finding: Democrat leaning
papers are more likely to cover scandals involving Republican
politicians and vice versa, even controlling for readership.

Question 12

Kellstedt 2000

Answer 12

Newsweek has applied
individualist (self-reliance) and egalitarian frames at different
rates to articles about race.

After controlling for persistence (autocorrelation), the likelihood of an egalitarian frame was higher when economic expectations were higher

Egalitarian frames led to more liberal racial policy preferences but individualistic ones had no effect.

Question 13

Kalla and Broockman 2018

Answer 13

Systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments.

Thesis: “The best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and
advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general
elections is zero.”

“Persuasive effects only appear to emerge in two rare
circumstances
1. when candidates take unusually unpopular positions and
campaigns invest unusually heavily in identifying persuadable
voters.
2. when campaigns contact voters long before election day and
measure effects immediately—although this early persuasion
decays.”

Question 14

Mudde 2018

Answer 14

Thesis: little basis for a draconian policy response on fake news in RW groups.

Evidence: Oxford Internet Institute and others found junk news concentrated in right wing groups
BUT: People who consume fake news consume more real news
I Nyhan and others: intense partisans look for fake news to confirm beliefs rather than to form them.
I Little evidence that fake news sways elections: just like the classic Lazarfeld “minimal effects” thesis
I So little basis for a draconian policy response, especially when
real news is sometimes mistaken

Question 15

Flynn et. al. 2017

Answer 15

Misperceptions about politics

Thesis: ‘We argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which limits the effectiveness of corrective information about controversial issues and political figures’

Misperceptions about scientific, social and political facts
widespread.
I E.g. on climate change, MMR vaccination and autism,
genetically modified food, public spending rates.
I Misperceptions linked to partisanship, e.g. on presidential
power to control petrol prices
I Reactions to corrections differ by partisanship
I E.g. Absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 2003
interpreted as evidence they were never there by Democrats but
as having been destroyed by Republicans (Duefler 2004)
I Corrections can backfire most among those with high political
knowledge
I E.g. “death panel” corrections for high-knowledge Sarah Palin
supporters

Question 16

Hopkins et. al. 2017

Answer 16

Finding: Newspaper coverage tended to reflect, rather than influence, public perceptions of the economy.

note: US based study- with a more dispersed media. I.e. fewer big national papers compared with the UK? Also: ‘We have studied only a subset of media outlets, with no attention to cable television, radio, social media, newspapers with smaller circulations, or other would-be sources of economic information.’

‘perceptions shift prior to national newspaper coverage. One explanation is that Americans are able to extract economic information from media coverage regardless of its tone; a second is that other sources of information— including media outlets with narrower, more targeted audiences, as well as actual economic conditions or social networks—prove influential.’

Question 17

Goldstein and Ridout 2004

Answer 17

Hillsborough disaster and EU. post-1989

Thesis: Sun reading causes anti-EU stance.

Hillsborough there was a big boycott of the Sun esp around Liverpool, and thereby received less anti-EU framing than previously. People in Liverpool concurrently became more pro-EU.

CA: But there’s a lot going on here, e.g. an increase in anti-tory sentiment (partly related to Hillsborough).

Question 18

Newton 2006

Answer 18

Thesis: minimal persuasive effects

the less politically aware are more likely to be swayed but less likely to actually interact with messages; the more aware are more likely to recognise that they have reasons not to accept the political message even though they are more likely to receive it.
Partisans, especially in polarised environments, are less likely to accept a countervailing message also.

the media will be highly constrained in which sides they can actually argue for, by both their readership and their pool of journalists- for they are generally motivated by profit and often can’t pay their journalists more to keep them if they go against their views

Question 19

Chong and Druckman 2010

Answer 19

Decaying effects

Competing frames cancel each other out, but people tend to give more weight to messages they’ve heard recently, because their effects decay over time. People who use on-line methods give more weight to earlier considerations.

Question 20

Barnes and Hicks 2018

Answer 20

Thesis: popular attitudes regarding austerity are influenced by media (and wider elite) framing

Finding: While voters who read certain newspapers are more likely to be pro/anti-austerity in accordance with their newspapers’ view, there is only a v small effect magnitude when they tried to establish a causal effect- suggests that readers go to newspapers they agree with, not v.v.

Hard to tell- it could be because people were already clear what they think at the time of the study.

Question 21

Lenz and Lawson 2007

Answer 21

Thesis: Attractive political candidates are more successful. Tv amplified this effect.

Question 22

Schaub and Morisi 2020

Answer 22

Finding: Populist parties more likely to attract voters with broadband in Italy and Germany- mainstraem parties don’t have this effect.

Scope claim: this occurs when there is a lack of access to the main political arenas (especially the national parliament), and exclusion from mainstream media coverage.’

Question 23

Ladd and Lenz 2009

Answer 23

Finding: The switch of the Sun and other papers to Labour in 97 persuaded 10-25% of readers to switch to Labour.

Methodological pros:
Easier to measure individual exposure to press messages than in the US- fewer big papers, rather than hundreds of local papers.
Panel data rules out self-selection (of paper reading?) because they could measure which paper they wrote before the endorsement shifts in 96
The communication shift itself reduces the chances of self-selection (newspapers would have had to anticipate that their readers would vote labour before that even showed up in polling- the shift in the papers seemed to happen before that in the readership)
Large number of control subjects

Problems:
Panel attrition- conservative readers may have self-selected away before the papers even switched (though the readership of the papers didn’t shift in the 1992-6 period). And there was no disparity in labour and conservative supporters who dropped out 1992-7. [However, there was a high dropout rate (~45%), and this plausibly may have selected for high-political interest voters]

Particular political environment needed to allow papers to switch

Question 24

Druckman and Lupia 2016

Answer 24

Preference Change in Competitive Political Environments

Thesis: (a) Many stimuli compete for every person’s attention, and (b) every person’s capacity to pay attention to information is limited. Thus voters use a variety of cues to make decision making easier

Where there is competing information, people use cues such as partisanship, ideology, group endorsements, polls, and appearance. People with high political knowledge tend to focus on ideology and endorsements more often, whereas those with low political knowledge focuses on partisanship and appearance. Higher political knowledge suggests a better use of cues (so that decisions are similar to those that would have been made without cues)

Two value dimensions that drive attitudes: hierarchy– egalitarianism (e.g., whether resources are distributed along differentiated or undifferentiated lines) and individualism–communitarianism (e.g., whether individuals are responsible for their own flourishing or whether the collective is charged with securing basic needs). There is often intense value-framing competition. When people are exposed to competing value frames, none of them wines- people fall back on their pre-existing values.

Question 25

Stevens and Karp 2012

Answer 25

Thesis: both the amount and the tone of newspaper media coverage can affect leadership evaluations.

The media tends to focus on process and personality, not issues. Early research suggested that in the US presidents are judged according to ‘presidential prototypes’, with competence and trustworthiness as preeminent traits in their selection

Evidence: ‘We found that media attention to character in Labour and Conservative newspapers was associated both with the growing influence of trust and also with the diminished influence of responsiveness.’ Trust was more important to voters’ concerns than competence and responsiveness (which may be due to Iraq).

We found similar effects to the sheer number of stories – an impact of the cumulative tone of coverage of character in Conservative newspapers on the weight given to perceptions of Blair’s trustworthiness and responsiveness

For respondents who trusted Blair, negative coverage of character rendered their feelings towards Blair more positive than positive coverage of character or an absence of coverage of character.’

CAs: They note that their measures of media exposure are blunt and they are limited to one election.
[it was also a rolling cross-sectional approach- so potential issues of causal directionality (and selection bias?)]
->Newspapers may have been following voters

Question 26

Jones et. al. 2017

Answer 26

Get out the vote campaigns- evidence from messages to 61m Fb users

Finding: A large-scale experiment during the 2010 U.S. Congressional Election demonstrated a positive effect of an online get-out-the-vote message on real world voting behavior. This also affected the friends of those contacted.

Evidence: of the 61m contacted, 60,000 were influenced to vote, and via friends we can see that 280,000 more were indirectly persuaded.

CA: Effect still seems quite small- well under 0.5%.

Question 27

Lenz 2009

Answer 27

“Learning and Opinion Change, Not Priming: Reconsidering the Priming
Hypothesis.”

Thesis: In four prominent cases of alleged priming, voters were not swayed in the focus they placed on a particular issue. Instead, the messages they received taught them about their favoured party’s or candidate’s positions on the issue, and they adopted their favoured candidate/party’s opinion as their own.

Lenz (AJPS 2009) argues that some cases of apparent priming are actually learning effects, including European Integration as an issue at 1997 British election I
Following [diagram] shows increase in correlation between EU attitude and vote among those who learnt the party positions
If this is priming then people won’t be changing their opinions on the EU, just judging parties more on EU policy.
Given initial EU attitudes, learners didn’t change their votes
But learners did change their EU attitudes to align more to their prior party preference

Question 28

Valentino et. al. 2011

Answer 28

Finding: ‘Our results suggest that anger can powerfully motivate political participation, especially in interaction with the skills and resources that dominate current theories of participation’

'’we also find important distinctions between the effects of anger and other emotions. In an experiment where emotions were induced independently, we find anger, but not anxiety or enthusiasm, significantly boosts participation. In our 2008 survey, we find anger to be positively linked to participation, while anxiety actually decreases participation and enthusiasm has little effect’

So anger isn’t the negative thing people often think

Question 29

Soroka et al 2012

Answer 29

Auntie knows best

Finding: ‘compared to commercial news, PSBs have a positive influence on knowledge of hard news, though not all PSBs are equally effective in this way. Cross-national differences are related to factors such as de jure independence, proportion of public financing and audience share.’

‘Controlling for self-selection as best we can, it appears as though those exposed to public television news learn more about hard news (and in some cases soft news as well) than those exposed to private television news for the same amount of time per week.’