Abstract
Research has shown that citizens with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively, and there is also suggestive evidence that they rely less on established news sources like the legacy press. However, due to data limitations, there is still no solid evidence whether populist citizens have skewed news diets in the contemporary high-choice digital media environment. In this paper, we rely on the selective exposure framework and investigate the relationship between populist attitudes and the consumption of various types of online news. To test our theoretical assumptions, we link 150 million Web site visits by 7,729 Internet users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to their responses in an online survey. This design allows us to measure media exposure more precisely than previous studies while linking these data to demographic attributes and political attitudes of participants. The results show that populist attitudes leave pronounced marks in people’s news diets, but the evidence is heterogeneous and highly contingent on the supply side of a country’s media system. Most importantly, citizens with populist attitudes visit less Web sites from the legacy press, while consuming more hyperpartisan news. Despite these tendencies, the Web tracking data show that populist citizens still primarily get their news from established sources. We discuss the implications of these results for the current state of public spheres in democracies.
Highlights
Extant research has shown that people with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively (Fawzi 2019; Pew Research 2018; Schulz et al 2018)
We argue that populist attitudes are related to selective exposure, that is, the selection of information according to prior political beliefs (Stroud 2017)
Wellknown structural differences between media systems still leave a strong mark in online news consumption (RQ2)
Summary
Extant research has shown that people with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively (Fawzi 2019; Pew Research 2018; Schulz et al 2018). There is some evidence that citizens with populist attitudes make less use of established news sources like legacy press outlets (Newman et al 2019; Schulz 2019b). These political predispositions can be especially impactful given the increasing autonomy of citizens in contemporary high-choice digital media environments (Van Aelst et al 2017). Whereas previous research has relied on survey-based self-reports of media exposure, we use digital behavioral data from the Web browsing histories of 7,729 study participants in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We further show that the study participants are similar to participants in external benchmark studies in their online and offline news consumption and in their privacy attitudes
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