Choosing a media outlet when seeking public approval

This paper considers the media outlet choice of a politician who seeks public approval for a political agenda in a broadcast interview. The available media outlets differ in their “toughness” towards the politician. An interview with a tougher media outlet is more informative, but is also more likely to yield a negative outcome. The choice of the media outlet determines the accuracy of the information that flows to the public and the volume of citizens who consume that information. The analysis shows that (1) politicians who enjoy sufficient popularity are likely to avoid tough media outlets, (2) when seeking approval for controversial agendas, politicians are more likely to appear in tougher outlets.     

Media proliferation and partisan selective exposure

The number of Internet news media outlets has skyrocketed in recent years. We analyze the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes assuming voters may choose news that is too partisan, from an informational perspective, i.e., engage in partisan selective exposure. We find that if voters who prefer highly partisan news—either because they are truly ideologically extreme, or due to a tendency towards excessive selective exposure—are politically “important,” then proliferation is socially beneficial, as it makes these voters more likely to obtain informative news. Otherwise, proliferation still protects against very poor electoral outcomes that can occur when the number of outlets is small and the only media options are highly partisan. Our model’s overall implication is thus that, surprisingly, proliferation is socially beneficial regardless of the degree of selective exposure.     

The Iraq Coalition of the Willing and (Politically) Able: Party Systems,the Press,and Public Influence on Foreign Policy

Media outlets in multiparty electoral systems tend to report on a wider range of policy issues than media in two‐party systems. They thus make more competing policy frames available to citizens. This suggests that a “free press” is insufficient to hold governments accountable. Rather, we should observe more challenges to the governments’ preferred frames and more politically aware citizens in multiparty democracies. Such citizens should thus be better equipped to hold their leaders accountable, relative to their counterparts in two‐party democracies. I propose a mechanism through which democratic publics can sometimes constrain their leaders in foreign policy. I test hypotheses derived from my theory with cross‐national data on the content of news coverage of Iraq, on public support for the war, and on decisions to contribute troops to the Iraq “Coalition of the Willing.” I find that citizens in countries with larger numbers of parties confronted more critical and diverse coverage of Iraq, while those with more widespread access to mass media were more likely to oppose the war and their nations likely to contribute fewer troops to the Coalition.     

Why Do Partisan Media Polarize Viewers?

The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in whether such outlets polarize viewers. I draw on theories of motivated reasoning to explain why partisan media polarize viewers, why these programs affect some viewers much more strongly than others, and how long these effects endure. Using a series of original experiments, I find strong support for my theoretical expectations, including the argument that these effects can still be detected several days postexposure. My results demonstrate that partisan media polarize the electorate by taking relatively extreme citizens and making them even more extreme. Though only a narrow segment of the public watches partisan media programs, partisan media's effects extend much more broadly throughout the political arena.     

Strategic political commentary

I model the media’s role in transmitting information to voters in a strategic framework. Media outlets in which commentators speak primarily to voters of like type face strong incentives to reveal private information about political choices truthfully, while “mainstream” outlets observed by all types of voters face mixed incentives. Also, the number of preference-matched news outlets determines the informativeness of the mainstream media; a general increase in the number of news outlets does not necessarily improve the quality of information conveyed by the media. The model also rationalizes why commentators of a single political preference predominate in the mainstream media.     

Candidate Authenticity: ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’

Political Behavior - In recent electoral contests, political observers and media outlets increasingly report on the level of “authenticity” of political candidates. However, even though...     

Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility

Americans have long believed in upward mobility and the narrative of the American Dream. Even in the face of rising income inequality and substantial empirical evidence that economic mobility has declined in recent decades, many Americans remain convinced of the prospects for upward mobility. What explains this disconnect? I argue that their media diets play an important role in explaining this puzzle. Specifically, contemporary Americans are watching a record number of entertainment TV programs that emphasize “rags-to-riches” narratives. I demonstrate that such shows have become a ubiquitous part of the media landscape over the last two decades. Online and lab-in-the-field experiments as well as national surveys show that exposure to these programs increases viewers’ beliefs in the American Dream and promotes internal attributions of wealth. Media exemplars present in what Americans leisurely consume every day can powerfully distort economic perceptions and have important implications for public preferences for economic redistribution.     

How Japanese wallflowers turned into celebrities: self-mockery and self-revelation of the female comedy duo Harisenbon

ABSTRACT

This study examines the Japanese female comedy duo Harisenbon. By examining their approach to comedy and their reception by Japanese media and society, it discusses how they use their “ugly”, “fat” and “skinny” personas to expose Japanese social pressures upon women. It considers how both comedians present a self-image that apparently matches their stage characters, and how their interactions with mainstream media endorses the very social norms they ridicule, without directly challenging or satirising them, even if this leaves space for destabilising the assumptions on which they are based. It observes that one half of the duo, who is more successful than the other, might be due to her willingness to mock her own appearance more savagely.     

Weighing the “burden of ‘acting white’”: Are there race differences in attitudes toward education?

Recent reports by ethnographic researchers and media sources suggest that many African American students view academic success as a form of “acting white,” and that peer pressure reduces their level of effort and performance. This article analyzes the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to answer three questions: (1) do blacks experience greater alienation toward school than non-Hispanic whites?; (2) do blacks incur social penalties from their peers for succeeding academically?; and (3) if so, are these “achievement penalties” greater than those for whites? Our analysis suggests the answer to each of the three questions is “apparently not.”     

The Capability Approach and the Debate Between Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights. A Critical Survey

This paper provides a critical exploration of the capability approach to human rights (CAHR) with the specific aim of developing its potential for achieving a synthesis between “humanist” or “naturalistic” and “political” or “practical” perspectives in the philosophy of human rights. The “Polemical Context: the Debate Between Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights” section presents a general strategy for achieving such a synthesis. The “The Capability Approach to Human Rights” section provides an articulation of the key insights of CAHR (its focus on actual realizations given diverse circumstances, its pluralism of grounds, its emphasis on freedom of choice, its demand for public reasoning, its context-sensitive universalism, and its broad view of obligations). These insights go some way toward the achievement of the desired synthesis. But, as explained in the “Need for Further Development of the Approach” section, in its current form, CAHR faces two serious objections by the defenders of the political perspective: the gap between capabilities–interests and rights objection and the disconnect from practice objection. Answering these criticisms requires some amendments to CAHR. The “Recommending a Contractualist Framework of Normative Reasoning” section suggests a response to the first objection based on the introduction of a contractualist framework of justification. The “Recharacterizing the Cosmopolitanism Inherent in the Humanist Standpoint” and “Focusing on a Three-Dimensional Picture in the Search for Deliberative Reflective Equilibrium about Human Rights” sections tackle the second objection by introducing a recharacterization of the cosmopolitan standard underlying the humanist perspective and by identifying the differences and relations between various dimensions of a conception of human rights and their significance for actual political practice. The paper illustrates the practical implications of CAHR, in its modified form, for the pursuit of some important rights.     

When presidential candidates voice party issues,does Twitter listen?

ABSTRACT

Presidential candidates often speak to their party’s issues because parties are thought to have “greater competence on handling” some issues versus others [Petrocik 1996, “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (3): 825–850, 825]. The present study considers whether Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tend to use different vocal inflections when talking about their party’s issues. Using the audio from the three 2016 presidential debates, we not only find Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump seem to be more emotionally invested in their party’s issues, but they use distinct vocal patterns which suggest they “own” some issues more than others. To assess whether viewers responded more positively to these different vocal inflections, we used the valence of 428,185 live-tweets. Ultimately, we found Twitter was net-positive when the candidates raised their vocal pitch while talking about their party’s issues. This suggests nonverbal cues are an important component of issue ownership.     

A Tale of Two Fears: Exploring Media Depictions of Nuclear Power and Global Warming

Advanced technologies like nuclear power and looming environmental threats such as global climate change present major policy challenge for modern cultures. Public policy about such crucial and complex issues depends on public attitudes, which, in turn, tend to be strongly affected by mass media coverage. How “well” has the mass media portrayed these two evolving risk stories? Employing perspectives from both journalism and social science, this article will first review the history of mass media coverage of each topic, then analyze their differences.     

Dark necessities? Candidates’ aversive personality traits and negative campaigning in the 2018 American Midterms

Are candidates with “dark” personality profiles more likely to go negative? We triangulate data for the 2018 Senate Midterms in the United States from two independent sources (the automated coding of social media posts and an expert survey) and test the extent to which the candidates’ “dark” personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) are associated with their negativity and incivility. By and large, we find that this is the case, especially when combining the separate traits into broader indicators of “dark” personality (“dark core” and underlying personality dimensions). These results resist robustness checks via models run with alternative specifications, such as using measures of personality (and campaign) that are adjusted to filter out the ideological profile of experts, additional covariates, more restrictive modelling, and alternative measurement of key dependent variables.     

Political competition when media create candidates’ charisma

This paper studies the location decisions of political parties. We propose a game where agents vote according to ideology and valence, and media create candidates’ charisma. The results we obtain show that candidates realize the power of media and therefore, locate themselves at some point between the position of the median voter and that of the media. We further obtain that depending on the media outlets the voters choose to see, the equilibrium location of candidates may differ. Thus, when voters choose among the outlets, candidates may differentiate their platforms. Differently, when voters are exposed to all the outlets, candidates tend more to moderate their ideology, in an attempt to get the favor of all the media.     

Politicians in Television

ABSTRACT

Television viewers, journalists and social influence analysts often use the term “television character” or “media-savvy person” when referring to people (also to politicians) who draw the viewers' attention and interest (Reeves, Naas, 2000). The purpose of the research presented herein is to answer two questions: (1) what are the differences in social perception of five main personality dimensions (“the Big Five”: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience [intellect]) of media-savvy politicians and those considered to belong to the non-media-savvy type; and (2) how traits attributed to media-savvy and media-un-savvy politicians remain connected with the viewers' political self-identification. A hundred journalism students, using an adjective list for “the Big Five” diagnosis (five dimensions of personality), were to identify their political beliefs as right wing, mixed, or left wing and to describe a politician they considered to be the most media-savvy and the least media-savvy person. Results indicate that media-avvy politicians are perceived to be more extrovert (dynamic), more open to experience, and more conscientious than their media-un-savvy counterparts; participants' (viewers') political beliefs reflect the importance of openness and conciliation in perception of media-savvy and non-media-savvy politicians.     

Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of The Biggest Loser Australia

The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality television weight-loss programme that positions itself as a response to the so-called “obesity crisis”. Research on TBL has thus far focussed on audience responses and its effect on viewers’ beliefs about weight loss. This article focuses instead on how meaning is constructed in TBL. We conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a key episode of TBL (the 2012 Australian season finale) to examine how the textual, visual and auditory elements combine to construct meanings beyond the ostensible health messages. Although the overt message is that all contestants have worked hard, turned their lives around and been “successful”, examination of editing choices, lighting and colour, clothing and time spent on contestants allows us to see that the programme constructs varying degrees of success between contestants and provides accounts for these differences in outcomes. In this way the programme is able to present itself as a putative celebration of all contestants while prescribing narrow limits around what constitutes success. TBL reinforces an ideology in which “success” is a direct result of “the work” of weight loss (both physical and emotional), which can apparently be read straightforwardly off the body. TBL’s “celebration” of weight loss thus reproduces and strengthens the widespread view of fat bodies as physical manifestations of individual (ir)responsibility and psychological dysfunction, and contributes to the ongoing stigmatisation of obesity.     

Viewing The Biggest Loser: modes of reception and reflexivity among obese people

This article builds on previous reception research and scholarship on makeover TV through an analysis of obese people's views of The Biggest Loser (TBL). TBL involves obese people competing to lose weight as personal trainers push them through dietary and physical activity regimes. We articulate four themes characterizing responses to TBL: “That's not reality,” “Public ownership and judgment of the fat body,” “The lure of the transformation,” and “A guilty pleasure.” We consider how these themes are reflected in participants' movement between mediated, discursive, transparent, and referential modes of reception. While some were adamant in their rejection of the program, others were ambivalent in accepting and identifying with the desire for weight loss but questioning TBL's aesthetic dimensions and moralizing undertones. We argue that the reflexivity of viewers complicates appraisals of TBL as governing at a distance and offer some alternative readings of the impact and appeal of the program.     

Partisanship,media and the objective economy: Sources of individual-level economic assessments

Economic voting studies have repeatedly shown that voter's assessment of incumbent economic performance is important for the vote decision. However, there is little work explaining how individuals form their economic assessments. Utilizing individual-level data from Turkey, we find that variation in retrospective assessments can actually be predicted by individual income growth rates over the previous year, and the association is stronger for pocketbook assessments. Nonetheless, partisanship and media are important sources of bias, especially for sociotropic assessments. Controlled for partisanship, viewers of pro-government media are more likely to think that the national economy has done better than their own household over the last year, and also more likely to believe that the economy would fare worse if the incumbent is replaced. The findings testify both to the capacity of the individuals to anchor their assessments to personal experience, and to the media's ability to weaken this anchor.