Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure

Today, people have ample opportunity to engage in selective exposure, the selection of information matching their beliefs. Whether this is occurring, however, is a matter of debate. While some worry that people increasingly are seeking out likeminded views, others propose that newer media provide an increased opportunity for exposure to diverse views. In returning to the concept of selective exposure, this article argues that certain topics, such as politics, are more likely to inspire selective exposure and that research should investigate habitual media exposure patterns, as opposed to single exposure decisions. This study investigates whether different media types (newspapers, political talk radio, cable news, and Internet) are more likely to inspire selective exposure. Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, evidence supports the idea that people’s political beliefs are related to their media exposure—a pattern that persists across media types. Over-time analyses suggest that people’s political beliefs motivate their media use patterns and that cable news audiences became increasingly politically divided over the course of the 2004 election.

Evaluating Measures of Campaign Advertising Exposure on Political Learning

Scholars employ various methods to measure exposure to televised political advertising but often arrive at conflicting conclusions about its impact on the thoughts and actions of citizens. We attempt to clarify one of these debates while validating a parsimonious measure of political advertising exposure. To do so, we assess the predictive power of six different measurement approaches—from the simple to the complex—on learning about political candidates. Two datasets are used in this inquiry: (1) geo-coded political advertising time-buy data, and (2) a national panel study concerning patterns of media consumption and levels of political knowledge. We conclude that many traditional methods of assessing exposure are flawed. Fortunately, there is a relatively simple measure that predicts knowledge about information featured in ads. This measure involves combining a tally of the volume of advertisements aired in a market with a small number of survey questions about the television viewing habits of geo-coded respondents.     

Jing Wang,Brand New China: Advertising,Media, and Commercial Culture

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

The Impact of Advertising and Media on the Arab Culture: The Case of the Arab Spring,Public Spheres,and Social Media

The Arab world has experienced some unprecedented social movements, labeled by the media as the Arab Spring. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of public policy, advertising, media, and public spheres on the Arab Spring. The media and economic policies enacted in the Arab world in the 1990s played a significant role in changing consumer culture in the Arab region, resulting in significant changes in public policy. Two studies were conducted to test how the change in consumer culture along with new public polices in the region contributed to the uprisings.     

Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environment

In a democracy, knowledge is power. Research explaining the determinants of knowledge focuses on unchanging demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. This study combines data on the public's knowledge of nearly 50 political issues with media coverage of those topics. In a two-part analysis, we demonstrate how education, the strongest and most consistent predictor of political knowledge, has a more nuanced connection to learning than is commonly recognized. Sometimes education is positively related to knowledge. In other instances its effect is negligible. A substantial part of the variation in the education-knowledge relationship is due to the amount of information available in the mass media. This study is among the first to distinguish the short-term, aggregate-level influences on political knowledge from the largely static individual-level predictors and to empirically demonstrate the importance of the information environment .     

Elements of Negativity: Volume and Proportion in Exposure to Negative Advertising

Recent studies contend that negative advertising benefits voters. However, these studies only measure the volume of negativity in campaigns, often relying on survey data on voter behavior coupled with estimates of negative ad exposure. Theories of information processing indicate that the proportion of negativity may yield influences spanning a range of judgments related to candidate construction and voting behavior, yielding effects that are different from the influence of sheer volume. Thus, I argue that the proportion of negativity also has an influence, and that it is likely more often to be detrimental. I examine this claim using survey data and conclude that prevailing accounts of the effects of negative advertising campaigns are underspecified and, as a result, potentially overly optimistic. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Gender Stereotypes,Information Search,and Voting Behavior in Political Campaigns

It is still unclear exactly how gender influences vote choice. Using an information processing perspective, we argue that instead of directly influencing vote choice, candidate gender guides the amounts and types of information that voters search for during a campaign, and that effects of gender on vote choice ultimately come from differences in information search influenced by candidate gender. Using two unique experimental datasets, we test the effects of candidate gender on vote choice and information search. We find that subjects change their search based on a candidate’s gender, seeking out more competence-related information about female candidates than they do for male candidates, as well as more information related to “compassion issues.” We also find that evaluations of candidates’ traits and issue positions are important predictors of subjects’ vote choice.     

Social Influences on Online Political Information Search and Evaluation

Americans are turning to the Internet to learn about politics in greater and greater numbers. Under the current “Web 2.0” paradigm in which users are encouraged to interact with online content, voters encountering political information on the Internet are typically exposed to more than just the news; online information is often colored by the reactions of previous readers, whether in the form of displayed comments or in readily apparent tallies of the number of “likes” or “shares” a particular item has received. In this paper we consider the effect these social cues have on online political information search and evaluation. Using processing-tracing software to monitor the patterns of information search and evaluation among our subjects, we find that social cues can function as a heuristic, allowing voters to reach judgments similar to those of their more informed counterparts. However, we also find that negative cues can adversely influence candidate evaluation, making subjects less disposed to a candidate than they would be in the absence of such signals.     

Mass Administrative Reorganization,Media Attention,and the Paradox of Information

How does media attention influence government decisions about whether to terminate independent administrative agencies? The authors argue that an agency's salience with partisan audiences has a direct effect, but a high media profile can disrupt normal government monitoring processes and obfuscate termination decisions. This argument is evaluated in the context of a recent mass administrative reorganization by the British coalition government using probit and heteroscedastic probit regression models. The evidence suggests that termination is less likely for agencies salient in newspapers popular with the government's core supporters but not those read by its minority coalition partner. We also find that agencies with greater overall newspaper salience as well as younger agencies have a higher error variance.     

The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization,Conspiracy Endorsement,and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries

Affective polarization is a key concern in America and other democracies. Although past evidence suggests some ways to minimize it, there are no easily applicable interventions that have been found to work in the increasingly polarized climate. This project examines whether irrelevant factors, or incidental happiness more specifically, have the power to reduce affective polarization (i.e., misattribution of affect or “carryover effect”). On the flip side, happiness can minimize systematic processing, thus enhancing beliefs in conspiracy theories and impeding individual ability to recognize deep fakes. Three preregistered survey experiments in the US, Poland, and the Netherlands (total N?=?3611) induced happiness in three distinct ways. Happiness had no effects on affective polarization toward political outgroups and hostility toward various divisive social groups, and also on endorsement of conspiracy theories and beliefs that a deep fake was real. Two additional studies in the US and Poland (total N?=?2220), also induced anger and anxiety, confirming that all these incidental emotions had null effects. These findings, which emerged uniformly in three different countries, among different partisan and ideological groups, and for those for whom the inductions were differently effective, underscore the stability of outgroup attitudes in contemporary America and other countries.

     

In Diversity We Trust: The Positive Effect of Ethnic Diversity on Outgroup Trust

Most studies on ethnic diversity and social trust rely on the standard measure of generalized trust. This study complements existing work on this topic by examining the effect of diversity on trust toward outgroups. This innovation is motivated by two closely connected arguments: At first, most existent studies are conducted in the framework of intergroup contact and conflict theory. These theories directly allude to trust toward outgroups. Second, recent empirical studies show that the standard measure of generalized trust is much less generalized than theoretically assumed. Instead it is blurred by a great deal of particularized trust. Explicit outgroup trust therefore seems to be better suited to empirically testing the extent to which growing ethnic diversity influences trust toward people different from oneself. The cross-national analysis yields a positive relationship between diversity and outgroup trust, which is an interesting finding given the current debate dominated by conflict theoretical reasoning.     

Central Banker Contracts, Incomplete Information, and Monetary Policy Surprises: In Search of a Selfish Central Banker?

Approaching monetary policy as a principal-agent problemprovides a useful framework for interpreting alternativedelegation schemes. In this paper, we consider theeffectiveness of central banker incentive schemes when theprincipal delegates monetary policy through contracts butremains uncertain about the central banker's responsiveness tosuch schemes. We adopt a simple principal-agent model andassume that the central banker's trade-off between socialwelfare and the incentive scheme is private information. Weconsider two types of central bankers; one who responds to theincentive scheme (``selfish'') and one who does not and onlycares about social welfare (``benevolent''). We demonstratethat when a benevolent central banker accepts a contractdesigned for a selfish central banker, positive inflationsurprises occur and output exceeds its natural rate. Wefurther show that a benevolent central banker with aninflation bias has an incentive to masquerade as selfish.Mechanisms exist that solve that problem by achievingpreference revelation. We consider a simple mechanism indominant strategies that induces the benevolent type eithernot to breach or not to accept the appointment (contract) inthe first place. This multi-period mechanism works with eitherinflation targets, or the appointment of a conservativecentral banker. Our results suggest that more complicatedincentive schemes, embedded within broader constitutionalarrangements, are required in the presence of privateinformation for them to work effectively.     

环境建设和改进对幼儿园的影响

随着时代的发展,人的审美和知识水平的提高,生活环境也在发生着显著的变化。幼儿时期是人一生中极为关键的时期,因此幼儿园的建设也成了当今人们关注的焦点之一,其不仅仅只是教师教学水平的提升,还很大程度上取决于幼儿园环境的建设水平。     

Intraparty Hostility: Social Identity,Subidentity, and the Hostile Media Effect in a Contested Primary

The hostile media effect (HME) has generally been tested in terms of in-groups and out-groups, with a “neutral” story in between. This ignores the nature of many social groups as comprising subgroups, often but not always sharing feelings of connectedness and purpose. In cases when bounded subgroups are at odds with one another, HME provides little guidance. A contested partisan primary provides such a case. This study takes identity centrality, candidate favorability, and perceived social network homogeneity as measures of partisanship and involvement, hypothesizing relationships between each and perceived bias against one’s candidate and party. Findings show that markers of candidate-focused social identity predict greater perceived bias against one’s candidate during the 2016 primary season, while party-focused identity fails to predict perceived bias against one’s party. This suggests that candidate support identity overrides plain partisanship during primaries, supporting concern that a heated primary might damage general election party unity. Subsequent postconvention findings suggest that the salience of candidate-focused identity fades, while homogeneity of one’s network regarding party support helps to make perceived hostility toward one’s party identity more salient. However, as campaigns become more candidate-centered, the contestation between nested candidate and party identities may grow fiercer.     

新媒体环境下高校增强舆论引导力的思考

在新媒体环境下,大学生的无束缚网络行为、网络信息的裂变式传播和网络舆情处理无固定模式都对高校增强舆论引导力提出了挑战。高校的舆论引导要坚持及时、真诚、平等和落实的原则,通过建立网络舆情预警体系、完善网络舆情处理机制和加强建设高校网络文化占领网络舆论高地,获取广大网民的价值认可,提高自身的网络舆论引导力。     

Discussion Networks,Issues, and Perceptions of Polarization in the American Electorate

Drawing on the sizable literature on polarization in the American public, we consider the link between discussion network composition and perceptions of polarization. Participants in the 2008–2009 ANES panel study were asked to complete an innovative battery; they interactively moved histograms to rate other groups’ positions on several prominent issues. These novel exercises provide data on individuals’ projections of the average attitudes of others, but critically, they also provide data on the variability of such attitudes. Thus, we use these “response-distributions” to thoroughly assess (1) the relationship between network characteristics and perceptions of the distance between party opinions, and (2) the relationship between network characteristics and perceptions of the homogeneity of opinions within parties. We find evidence that discussion networks track with individual perceptions of the parties in the electorate: exposure to interpersonal disagreement predicts the perception of less distance between (the mean opinions of) the parties, and the reporting of more heterogeneity of opinion within the parties. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for democratic functioning more generally.     

新媒介环境下的舆论引导及其策略

在新媒介环境中,公众分散的话语通常借助网络、手机短信等载体集中表达价值取向,形成强势舆论,并反制具有控制色彩的话语宣传。作为舆论引导主体的政府和媒体既要正视现实,又要树立正确的价值原则,采取积极有效的舆论引导策略,真正成为建构和谐社会、保证社会信息良性传播的重要管理者。