Trump Gave Them Hope: Studying the Strangers in Their Own Land

This article argues that a set of recent books published in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election provides a road map for understanding its outcome and a research agenda for political communication scholars in the years ahead. This article focuses on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, a field study that documents the roles that identity, narratives, and emotions play in shaping the political beliefs and behavior of White Tea Party supporters. Building on these insights, through an analysis of 123 content analyses published in Political Communication between 2003-2016, we demonstrate gaps in our field and argue that scholarship can grow analytically and empirically by accounting for the findings of these books. We conclude with suggestions for future research into people’s perceptions of identity, group status, deprivation, and political power, as well as the role of media, political actors, and social groups in creating these narratives of American politics.     

Any Publicity or Good Publicity? A Competitive Test of Visibility- and Tonality-Based Media Effects on Voting Behavior

When examining media effects on voting intentions, scholars of political communication have either focused on visibility- or tonality-based effects. Our study compares these effect models, asking whether the explanations are complementary or competitive; it goes beyond previous studies by considering interactions between media cues and voters’ attitudes. We draw on panel survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) that is combined with content analysis data of the main evening news broadcast in Germany. Findings show that visibility- and tonality-based effects are similar in potency, but tone-based effects are more contingent on attitudes toward parties and candidates. Both types of cues can backfire: higher visibility and more positive tonality can have negative effects on some attitude groups, which is in part moderated by the expectations about government coalitions. We find that visibility and tonality are rather complementary cues that both influence voting behavior. Implications are discussed.     

Utopianism and the Bush foreign policy

Amidst a renewed debate over the existence of an American empire, serious questions have emerged about whether the Bush foreign policy can be described as ‘realist’ given the widespread opposition that it encounters from academic realists. This paper is an attempt to shed light on this vexing issue by interpreting the Bush foreign policy through the lens of the broader religious–political tradition of America. Specifically, it argues that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration draw on the utopian strand of this tradition when setting their foreign policy agenda and justifying their decisions to the public. With special reference to Iraq, it discusses how three key utopian themes—the perfection of human life on earth, the possibility of limiting evil through conversion and the prospect of arresting human development—are reflected in the neoconservative agenda. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how these themes run counter to the tenets of classical realism and of the ethical and political hazards that emerge from an attempt at utopian empire.     

Assessing the Democratic Debate: How the News Media Frame Elite Policy Discourse

This article examines the way in which the news media frame public policy issues and the extent to which other political players (e.g., interest groups, politicians) influence this issue framing process. Our analysis focuses on the issue of gun control, comparing the rhetoric generated by interest groups and public officials on the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban with actual network news coverage of this legislation from 1988 to 1996. Results indicate that both sets of political players employed several interpretative issue frames and worked hard to put their preferred themes on the agenda. However, at times, the media intervened in the framing process, especially as the debate matured. Specifically, the news media (a) structured the overall tone of the gun control debate, (b) adopted a distribution of framing perspectives different from that of politicians and interest groups, and (c) packaged policy discourse more often than not in terms of the "culture of violence" theme. These findings point toward previously ignored media effects and attest to the potential role the media play in shaping public policy debates.     

Measuring the Media Agenda

Measuring media attention to politically relevant topics is of interest to a broad array of political science and communications scholars. We provide a practical guide for the construction, validation, and evaluation of time series measures of media attention. We review the extant literature on the coherence of the media agenda, which provides evidence in support of and evidence against the emergence of a single, national news agenda. Drawing expectations from this literature, we show the conditions under which a single national news agenda is likely to be present and where it is likely to be absent. We create 90 different keyword searches covering a wide range of topics and gather counts of stories per month from 12 national and regional media sources with data going back to 1980 where possible. We show using factor analysis wide variance in the strength of the first factor. We then estimate a regression model to predict this value. The results show the conditions under which any national source will produce time series results consistent with any other. Key independent variables are the average number of stories, the variance in stories per month, and the presence of any “spike” in the data series. Our large-scale empirical assessment should provide guidance to scholars assessing the quality of time series data on media coverage of issues.     

Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public,Media, and Political Agenda

Agenda-setting has mostly been investigated as the cognitive process set in motion by the salience of political issues in the traditional news media. The question, though, remained whether political entertainment shows—political satire, specifically—can also set the agenda. The current study investigates whether two episodes of Dutch satire show Zondag met Lubach (ZML) about the European Union-United States trade agreement Transatlantic Trade Investment and Partnership (TTIP) have triggered first-level agenda-setting effects. For that purpose, three studies have been conducted to investigate the three-step agenda-setting process (i.e., learning, understanding, acting) from saliency in satire to saliency on the public agenda, but also on the media and political agenda. Study 1: A two-wave panel survey shows that consumption of the satire show positively affected knowledge acquisition about TTIP, which is the first step in the cognitive process underlying agenda-setting. Study 2: A randomized experiment demonstrated that exposure to ZML increased the perceived understanding of TTIP, which subsequently had a positive impact on the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda. Study 3: Longitudinal time-series data provide evidence that the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda—short term—and on the political agenda—long term—were positively affected by the ZML satire episodes. The study, altogether, demonstrates satire’s ability to set the agenda of both the individual and aggregate level and emphasizes the persistent relevance of agenda-setting theory in today’s high-choice media environment.     

Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) and Interstate Conflict: Parsing Out IGO Effects for Alternative Dimensions of Conflict in Postcommunist Space

While the relationship between intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and conflict has captured the attention of international relations scholars for decades, the empirical results of this research agenda have presented contradictory conclusions regarding the pacifying effect normally attributed to IGOs. We address these contradictions by refocusing primarily on potential IGO effects on low-severity conflicts. We examine new states in the postcommunist space spanning Europe and Central Asia as a useful research site to explore these relationships in the post-Cold War era. We argue that especially in the case of newly emerging states, where there is little institutional memory and long-term experience in foreign affairs, IGOs expose differential policy preferences between members, and such information should be associated with the likelihood of increased low levels of conflict. We find a strong association between shared IGO membership and low severity conflict, a significant relationship between low and high severity conflict, and differences between IGO membership effects on low versus high severity conflict, consistent with our theoretical argument.     

Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In

In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse.     

Global Television News and Foreign Policy: Debating the CNN Effect

This study investigates the origins and development of the cable news network (CNN) effect hypothesis. It reveals an ongoing debate among politicians, officials, and journalists who are involved in the political processes that this hypothesis attempts to explain, and also among scholars who have been studying it. Debates have been conducted both within and among these groups on the meaning and validity of the CNN effect, but none has contributed significantly to resolving the issue. On the contrary, these debates have presented contradicting statements that have only created confusion and misunderstanding. This study presents lessons from the decade-long effort to explore the CNN effect and projects a new agenda for more useful approaches towards different effects of global communication, apart from those covered by the present controversial hypothesis.     

Introduction: Communication and Civic Engagement in Comparative Perspective

The present era is defined by sweeping changes in economies, social institutions, political party systems, and communication processes in many nations. These changes go by various names from globalization to poststructuralism. The impact of these tectonic shifts in the political foundations of nations is greatly debated. In particular, considerable uncertainty surrounds the effects of various changes on the importance of politics for individual citizens and for the kinds of civic activities that people engage in and even regard as political. This is an important time for communication scholars to develop comparative frameworks that bring conceptions of social change together with how people located in various cultural, demographic, and audience groups define their relations to government and, more broadly, to civil society. At stake is our understanding of the role of communication in shaping these political relations, and in shaping the attitudes of citizens about politics, government, and society itself.     

Intramedia Mediation: The Cumulative and Complementary Effects of News Media Use

This study focuses on one often overlooked political communication-based media effect, intramedia mediation, and the indirect effects that stem from relationships that exist among various forms of media use. Data from a 2000 national Annenberg election panel survey are used to assess a series of relationships between television and newspaper public affairs use and how these forms of media consumption affect citizens' knowledge of presidential campaign endorsements. The indirect effects that stem from the relationships that exist among these two forms of media use reflect the cumulative and complementary functions of mass communication consumption across time. An analysis of intramedia mediation in coordination with the study of the direct effects of public affairs media use on this study's outcome variable produces substantially larger overall effects for both forms of news use. Thus, the study of intramedia mediation contributes to a better understanding of the full range of media influences on a given outcome variable over the course of a political campaign. Ramifications of these findings are outlined and future lines of research summarized.     

Media Coverage of Congress in the 1990s: Scandals,Personalities, and the Prevalence of Policy and Process

In this article, we provide a comprehensive, systematic examination of media coverage of Congress in the 1990s. Specifically, we content analyze over 2,600 congressional news stories from the New York Times and CBS Evening News from 1990 through 1998. We find that the news media covered substantive policy concerns and the legislative process quite regularly and that stories focusing on individual personalities and political scandals were comparatively infrequent. We also find that legislative maneuvering is a mainstay of congressional media coverage, and the democratic process is most often framed as conflict between parties and Congress and the president.     

Social Structure and Citizenship: Examining the Impacts of Social Setting,Network Heterogeneity,and Informational Variables on Political Participation

In this study, we develop a model of the interplay between sociostructural determinants of an individual's discussion behavior, such as the setting of primary discussion networks (work, church, and volunteer groups) and the nature of discussion (i.e., level of exposure to non-like-minded ideas), and individual-level outcomes, such as hard news media use, political knowledge, and participation in political processes. In doing so, we synthesize many of the different and sometimes competing models that political communication scholars have used to examine the link between more macroscopic sociological variables and the individual-level behaviors that political scientists often focus on. Data to test our theoretical model come from a national telephone survey conducted in October and November 2002. Our analysis showed that the social setting in which citizens discuss politics is an important antecedent of political participation. Discussion networks as part of volunteer groups, for example, indeed serve as important networks of recruitment. In other words, discussing politics frequently in this setting is positively and directly linked to political activity. The impact of conversational networks in church and work settings on participation, however, is only indirect. In fact, our data show that the impact of church and work networks on political participation is to a significant degree mediated by the different viewpoints that individuals are exposed to when they discuss politics in these settings.     

How Political Elites Process Information From the News: The Cognitive Mechanisms Behind Behavioral Political Agenda-Setting Effects

Political agenda-setting studies have shown that political agendas are influenced by the media agenda. Researchers in the field of media and politics are now focusing on the mechanisms underlying this pattern. This article contributes to the literature by focusing not on aggregate, behavioral political attention for issues (e.g., parliamentary questions or legislation), but on Members of Parliament’s (MP) individual, cognitive attention for specific news stories. Drawing upon a survey of Belgian MPs administered shortly after exposure to news stories, the study shows that MPs are highly selective in exploiting media cues. They pay more attention to both prominent and useful news stories, but a story’s usefulness is more important for cognitive processes that are closely linked to MPs’ real behavior in parliament. In other words, aggregate political agenda-setting effects are a consequence of the way in which individual MPs process media information that matches their task-related needs.     

Psychophysiology in the Study of Political Communication: An Expository Study of Individual-Level Variation in Negativity Biases

The use of psychophysiological measures has been relatively common in the study of communication; there has been a recent increase in interest among political behavioralists as well. There has nevertheless been a limited body of work that uses psychophysiological measures to better understand the impact of political mass media content. This article presents the case for using psychophysiological measures to study political communication. Focusing on skin conductance, it outlines the advantages of this measure for capturing subconscious responses to media over time, second-to-second. It then presents results from recent experimental work in the United States that highlights individual-level variation in responsiveness to negative versus positive news content—variation that is correlated with measures of psychophysiological reactions to non-news content, suggesting the relevance of deep-seated predispositions in psychophysiological research on media effects.     

Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft,Facebook, Twitter,and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle

This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general election campaigns, in addition to field observations at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. We find that technology firms are motivated to work in the political space for marketing, advertising revenue, and relationship-building in the service of lobbying efforts. To facilitate this, these firms have developed organizational structures and staffing patterns that accord with the partisan nature of American politics. Furthermore, Facebook, Twitter, and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers. We show how representatives at these firms serve as quasi-digital consultants to campaigns, shaping digital strategy, content, and execution. Given this, we argue that political communication scholars need to consider social media firms as more active agents in political processes than previously appreciated in the literature.     

The Combined Effect of Advertising and News Coverage in the Mexican Presidential Campaign of 2000

In July 2000, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) lost the presidency of Mexico after 71 years of continuous rule. Research based on individual data obtained with surveys shows that important media effects occurred. Using aggregate data, in this article the author explores the effects of political advertising and media coverage on preferences during the Mexican presidential campaign. Data on voter preferences are taken from results of a trial ballot question in public opinion polls. Data on advertising are measured in gross rating points. Data on media coverage are taken from the monitoring of newscasts on the two major networks. OLS regression models are developed, with preferences as the dependent variable and campaigning differentials as the independent variables. Based on aggregate data, this research shows that in Mexico's 2000 presidential campaign, exposure to political communication led to persuasion, and news appears to have been more important than ads. Political communication was a unified process where ads and news presence acted together in a very interesting fashion, “bounding” each other in periods of major changes in preferences but with news effects prevailing over ads. Qualified news differentials accounted for 20% of the variance in preferences, and ad differentials accounted for 8%. This media effect occurred through a cumulative process where ads and news coverage acted together.     

Advances and Opportunities in the Study of Political Communication,Foreign Policy,and Public Opinion

We review contemporary research at the intersection of political communication and foreign policy, highlighting four themes: 1) new, more realistic and psychologically-nuanced approaches that account for limited information and issue framing; 2) the question of whether the flow of communication between the state and the public is best conceived as a closed system, or one that is open to outside influences such as foreign elites; 3) how variations in political or governmental structures, patterns of media access or ownership, and other institutional factors can alter the relationships between foreign policy and communication processes; and 4) whether or not it is useful to distinguish between foreign and domestic policymaking when analyzing the role of political communication. We also suggest avenues for further research in each section and conclude by summarizing these opportunities for continued theoretical development.     

Media Matter: How Newspapers and Television News Cover Campaigns and Influence Voters

The conventional wisdom in political communications research is that the media play a dominant role in defining the agenda of elections. In Bernard Cohen's words, the media do not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. The present article challenges this conclusion. We present data on media coverage of the 1992 presidential election from the first nationally representative sample of American newspapers and compare these to the issue interests of the American public. We conclude that past claims that the media control the agenda-setting process have been overstated. Candidates messages are well represented in press coverage of the campaign, and coverage is even independent of a newspaper's editorial endorsement. We argue that agenda setting is a transaction process in which elites, the media, and the public converge to a common set of salient issues that define a campaign.     

Scary Pictures: How Terrorism Imagery Affects Voter Evaluations

Journalists, candidates, and scholars believe that images, particularly images of war, affect the way that the public evaluates political leaders and foreign policy itself, but there is little direct evidence on the circumstances under which political elites can use imagery to enhance their electoral chances. Using National Election Studies (NES) panel data as well as two experiments, this article shows that, contrary to concerns about the manipulative power of imagery, the effect of evocative imagery can enhance candidate evaluations across partisan lines when they originate from the news but are more limited when they are used for persuasive purposes. By looking over time, the three data sets demonstrate different circumstances in which terrorism images have different effects on candidate evaluations—crisis versus non-crisis times and through news exposure versus direct use by a candidate. The NES data reveal that exposure to watching the World Trade Center fall on television increased positive evaluations of George W. Bush and the Republican party across partisan boundaries in 2002 and 2004. The news experiment that exposed subjects to graphic terrorism news in a lab in 2005/2006 increased approval of Bush’s handling of terrorism among Democrats. Lastly, an experiment where hypothetical candidates utilized terrorism images in campaign communication in 2008 demonstrates that both parties’ candidates can improve evaluations of their foreign policy statements by linking those statements to evocative imagery, but it is more effective among their own party members.