Knowing your sources: Partisan media and voters’ perceptions of the economy

This paper explains how media systems influence the extent to which partisanship colors voters’ perceptions of the economy (i.e., the strength of the partisan screen). It builds upon research on individual-level biases in economic perceptions, seeking to extend existing work by considering how the availability of partisan media for a given party affect such biases. The implication of this is that the greater the availability of media sources favorable to a party, the stronger the partisan screen for its partisans. This follows from several mechanisms including selective acceptance of messages, selective exposure to partisan sources, and incidental exposure to partisan sources. Each of these suggests that differences in the availability of partisan media across parties leads to corresponding differences in the extent of partisan bias for partisans of these parties. I test this Hypothesis in 14 European countries over four time-periods using data built from expert surveys on media characteristics.