Political Information Environment Research Articles

Examining Active News Avoidance Across Countries: A Multilevel Moderation Analysis of News Interests, News Trust, and Press Freedom

Previous studies have identified various individual factors explaining news avoidance, but the understanding of how these factors function within the broader political information environment is limited. This study, leveraging a large-scale cross-national survey, reveals that the relationships between individual news interests, news trust, and news avoidance differ across countries with varying levels of press freedom. In nations where the press is strong and free, personal preferences minimally influence individuals’ active avoidance of hard news. News avoidance is not solely a product of individual-level attributes. Rather, the impact of these individual factors is significantly shaped by the overarching political information environment.

Obywatele w środowisku informacji politycznej: obszary badań i wyzwania metodologiczne

Citizens in Political Information Environment: Areas of Study and Methodological The aim of this paper is to offer a theoretical background for studies on political communication that focus on the role of the audience in the flow of political messages. We start with normative models of democracy and their demands upon citizens and the concept of political information environment. By employing these two concepts, we are able to focus on two dimensions of citizens’ roles in political communication, that is expectations towards media users who are perceived here as citizens, as well as citizens’ expectations towards news media disseminating political information. A combination of the aforementioned concepts provides us with a theoretical background for studies on actual news media consumption and related phenomena, such as news avoidance and selective media exposure.

“Hi, Folks!” Attention Populism as a Strategy for Dominating the Dissonant Information Environment

This study describes a strategy for dominating the digital political information environment: attention populism. Dissonance in the information environment is a significant trend that is forcing political communication to change. Strategies of political communications experts aimed at dominating the dissonant information environment, and thereby winning the support of various civic and electoral groups, are becoming increasingly apparent, especially among populist parties. We use discourse analysis in a case study to describe the communication strategy of the former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babiš. We focus on his weekly long posts on Facebook that open with the greeting, “Hi, folks!” The case study demonstrates how attention populism works in contemporary political communication practice.

Opinion-leading media as indicators of a democracy at risk: The press and the rise of National Socialism between 1927 and 1932

The rise of National Socialism in the late 1920s and 1930s happened within democratic societies with well-developed media systems. This gives rise to whether an increasingly right-wing press climate aided the emergence of National Socialism. Based on a comparative analysis of post-election reporting in German and Austrian newspapers, this paper argues that changes in the spectrum of opinion-leading media and in the relations both between them and with the opinion-following media can serve as indicators of a democracy at risk. Utilizing sociometric theory, it is hypothesized that in times of severe democratic crisis, the gap between elite-dominated, opinion-leading media and mass newspapers widens; reciprocal orientation among the opinion-leading media is lessened; and, finally, the composition of this group changes in favour of radical political forces. There is empirical evidence for all assumptions, reflecting a growing significance of extreme right-wing positions in the political information environment.

The degree of heterogeneity of news consumption in Germany—Descriptive statistics and relations with individual differences in personality, ideological attitudes, and voting intentions

This study aimed to examine the degree of homogeneity versus heterogeneity of individuals’ political information environments across offline and online media types and relations with sociodemographic variables, personality, and political attitudes. In two online surveys, German participants (sample 1: N = 686; sample 2: N = 702) provided information on sociodemographic variables, consumption of political news, and voting intentions, and completed the Big Five Inventory and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scales. Results revealed that absolutely homogeneous political news consumption was evident for a small proportion of individuals (2.04% and 0.43%). Openness (positively) and Agreeableness (negatively) exhibited significant associations with the degree of heterogeneity of political information environments across samples. No consistent patterns of relations with either the ideological attitudes of RWA and SDO or voting intentions were observed. The findings shed light on the existence of absolutely homogeneous political information environments and “who” might be prone to a more homogeneous versus more heterogeneous information environment.

What News Users Perceive as ‘Alternative Media’ Varies between Countries: How Media Fragmentation and Polarization Matter

Studies have extensively discussed what characterizes news media sources as alternative. However, this study focuses on users and the range of news sources they perceive as alternative media. We expect that these audience perceptions vary between countries, depending on the level of media fragmentation and polarization. We use original survey data from five countries (Denmark = 2,667 respondents; Italy = 2,121; Poland = 2,536; Switzerland = 1,859; United States = 3,493) and investigate (i) what sources are perceived by users as alternative and (ii) whether these perceptions differ among users embedded in more or less fragmented-polarized media environments. Our results reveal that users have distinctive types of media in mind when reporting alternative media consumption, fanning out on a spectrum from traditional mass media outlets to self-proclaimed alternative news media. Interestingly, despite a greater supply of alternative news sources and an overall higher propensity to indicate the use of alternative news sources, citizens in more fragmented-polarized media environments are more likely to indicate using mass media outlets as alternative news media. We conclude from these findings that media fragmentation and polarization in a political information environment contribute to the convergence of the alternative-to-mainstream spectrum in the eyes of their audiences.

Are public service media distinctive from the market? Interpreting the political information environments of BBC and commercial news in the United Kingdom

Public service media face an existential crisis. Many governments are cutting their budgets, while questioning the role and value of public service broadcasting because many citizens now have access to a wide range of media. This raises the question – do public service media supply a distinctive and informative news service compared to market-led media? Drawing on the concept of political information environment, this study makes an intervention into debates by carrying out a comparative content analysis of news produced by UK public service broadcasters and market-driven media across television, radio and online outlets (N = 1065) and interviewing senior editors about the routine selection of news. It found that almost all BBC news and commercial public service media platforms reported more news about politics, public affairs and international issues than entirely market-driven outlets. Online BBC news reported more informative topics than market-based media, which featured more entertainment and celebrity stories. The value of public service media was demonstrated on the United Kingdom’s nightly television news bulletins, which shone a light on the world not often reported, especially BBC News at Ten. Most market-driven media reported through a UK prism, excluding many countries and international issues. Overall, it is argued that the influence of public service media in the United Kingdom helps shape an information environment with informative news. The focus of the study is on UK media, but the conceptual application of interpreting a political information environment is designed to be relevant for scholars internationally. While communication studies have sought to advance more cross-national studies in recent years, this can limit how relevant studies are for debates in national political information environments. This study concludes by recommending more scholarly attention should be paid to theorising national policy dynamics that shape the political information environments of media systems within nations.

Navigating High-Choice European Political Information Environments: a Comparative Analysis of News User Profiles and Political Knowledge

The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individuals in 17 European countries. Our aim is to (i) profile different types of news consumers and (ii) understand how each user profile is linked to political knowledge acquisition. Our results show that five user profiles – news minimalists, social media news users, traditionalists, online news seekers, and hyper news consumers – can be identified, although the prevalence of these profiles varies across countries. Findings further show that both traditional and online-based news diets are correlated with higher political knowledge. However, online-based news use is more widespread in Southern Europe, where it is associated with lower levels of political knowledge than in Northern Europe. By focusing on news audiences, this study provides a comprehensive and fine-grained analysis of how contemporary European political information environments perform and contribute to an informed citizenry.

The political information environment in Denmark 2.0

The article analyzes and discusses recent developments in the political information environment in Denmark, understood as the supply of and demand for political news and political information in a given society. The article focuses on the supply of and demand for (political) news by traditional news media and alternative news media, as offered offline, online and on social media. The article shows that leading traditional news media are still the cornerstone of Danish news consumption, but also that users with lower levels of education and income from outside the Copenhagen area access traditional news outlets less frequently than the rest of the population. For social media, the analysis shows that Facebook remains the dominant social media platform in Denmark. At the same time, only 13 percent of Danish citizens consider “social media” as their most important source of news. Finally, the analysis of the Danish alternative media landscape shows that the monopoly position of traditional news media as a provider of news and views to a wide audience is increasingly challenged by a very heterogeneous group of new online media that includes hyperpartisan media, slow news media and debate-oriented media. The article concludes by discussing how the changes in the political information landscape can affect the democratic dialogue in Denmark.

Movement–Media Relations in the Hybrid Media System: A Case Study from the U.S. Transgender Rights Movement

Whereas social movement–media relations were, in the era of mass media, a dialogic relationship of mutual, albeit asymmetric, dependency between news makers and social movement organizations, the hybridization of the media system has complicated matters considerably. The dialogic tensions that drove organizations’ access to the political information environment have been supplanted by new tensions—tensions that have transformed organizations’ media work routines. Organizations must now manage tensions over the temporality of issue emergence, tensions between identity and policy knowledge as sources of expertise, tensions between emotional charge and informational novelty as criteria of newsworthiness for journalists, and tensions between policy demands and media demands in the formation of communications strategy. And these new tensions demand new work practices oriented toward addressing multiple audiences concurrently and via multiple media streams. Because the discourses of social media influence the press to such an extent, the successful management of press discourse requires both direct influence via routine media work targeting journalists and indirect influence via steering digital media discourse—the combination of which presents significant resource costs to movement organizations. This article draws on an ethnographic case study of media work in the U.S. transgender rights movement to extend theorizations of movement–media relations to account for the structuring influence of the hybrid media system, illustrating these news tensions in the context of the panic over transgender passport policy that erupted in the summer of 2018.

Computational Social Science and the Study of Political Communication

ABSTRACT The challenge of disentangling political communication processes and their effects has grown with the complexity of the new political information environment. But so have scientists’ toolsets and capacities to better study and understand them. We map the challenges and opportunities of developing, synthesizing, and applying data collection and analysis techniques relying primarily on computational methods and tools to answer substantive theory-driven questions in the field of political communication. We foreground the theoretical, empirical, and institutional opportunities and challenges of Computational Communication Science (CCS) that are relevant to the political communication community. We also assess understandings of CCS and highlight challenges associated with data and resource requirements, as well as those connected with the theory and semantics of digital signals. With an eye to existing practices, we elaborate on the key role of infrastructures, academic institutions, ethics, and training in computational methods. Finally, we present the six full articles and two forum contributions of this special issue illustrating methodological innovation, as well as the theoretical, practical, and institutional relevance and challenges for realizing the potential of computational methods in political communication.

Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage

AbstractMedia outlets provide crucial inputs into the democratic process, yet they face increasingly severe economic challenges. I study how a newly salient manifestation of this pressure, reduced reporting capacity, influences political coverage. Focusing on newspapers in the United States, where industry‐wide employment fell over 40% between 2007 and 2015, I use panel data to assess the relationship between reporting capacity and political coverage. Staff cuts substantially decrease the amount of political coverage newspapers provide. Across different samples and measurement approaches, a typical cutback to a newspaper's reporting staff reduces its annual political coverage by between 300 and 500 stories. These political news declines happen against the backdrop of similar reductions in nonpolitical coverage, meaning the share of newspaper articles focused on politics remains stable over this period. This demonstrates that economic pressure affects the political information environment by shaping the media's capacity to cover politics.

Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge

ABSTRACT Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since citizens have new channels at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly complement or even replace traditional channels of information. This study investigates to what extent citizens have knowledge about daily politics and to what extent news on social media can provide this knowledge. It does so by means of a large online survey in Belgium (Flanders), in which we measured what people know about current political events, their so-called general surveillance knowledge. Our findings demonstrate that unlike following news via traditional media channels, citizens do not gain more political knowledge from following news on social media. We even find a negative association between following the news on Facebook and political knowledge. We further investigate why this is the case. Our data demonstrate that this lack of learning on social media is not due to a narrow, personalized news diet, as is often suggested. Rather, we find evidence that following news via social media increases a feeling of information overload, which decreases what people actually learn, especially for citizens who combine news via social media with other news sources.

Misinformation and Polarization in a High-Choice Media Environment: How Effective Are Political Fact-Checkers?

One of the most fundamental changes in today’s political information environment is an increasing lack of communicative truthfulness. To explore this worrisome phenomenon, this study aims to investigate the effects of political misinformation by integrating three theoretical approaches: (1) misinformation, (2) polarization, and (3) selective exposure. In this article, we examine the role of fact-checkers in discrediting polarized misinformation in a fragmented media environment. We rely on two experiments ( N = 1,117) in which we vary exposure to attitudinal-congruent or incongruent political news and a follow-up fact-check article debunking the information. Participants were either forced to see or free to select a fact-checker. Results show that fact-checkers can be successful as they (1) lower agreement with attitudinally congruent political misinformation and (2) can overcome political polarization. Moreover, dependent on the issue, fact-checkers are most likely to be selected when they confirm prior attitudes and avoided when they are incongruent, indicating a confirmation bias for selecting corrective information. The freedom to select or avoid fact-checkers does not have an impact on political beliefs.

Comedic Cognition: The Impact of Elaboration on Political Comedy Effects

Political comedy has become an integral component of the political information environment. Though a great deal has been learned about the informative and persuasive effects of political comedy, the medium continues to evolve. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight presents heavily researched segments about issues that are often neglected in more traditional media. In the following study, we draw on the Elaboration Likelihood framework to argue that these long-form/low-salience segments challenge existing assumptions about the way people process political comedy. Specifically, we argue that effortful processing will enhance information acquisition and persuasion, that the social/sharing nature of the evolving media ecosystem will influence these effects, and that outcomes will be conditioned by an individual’s affinity for political humor. Results from a randomized experiment support these conclusions.

Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public

Recent years have seen a dramatic change in horserace coverage of elections in the U.S.—shifting focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that emphasize candidates’ chance of victory. Could this shift in the political information environment affect election outcomes? We use experiments to show that forecasting increases certainty about an election’s outcome, confuses many, and decreases turnout. Furthermore, we show that election forecasting has become promi- nent in the media, particularly in outlets with liberal audiences, and show that such coverage tends to more strongly affect the candidate who is ahead—raising questions about whether they contributed to Trump’s victory over Clinton in 2016. We bring empirical evidence to this question, using ANES data to show that Democrats and Independents expressed unusual confidence in a decisive 2016 election outcome—and that the same measure of confidence is associated with lower reported turnout.

Why context, relevance and repetition matter in news reporting: Interpreting the United Kingdom’s political information environment

This study develops a multi-method approach to analysing political information environments, exploring how media and political systems help shape people’s understanding of news. In doing so, we ask a question fundamental to democratic citizenship: how well do news media communicate political responsibility and policy differences across political systems? Our study examines the United Kingdom’s political information environment, where significant power is devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with different political parties in control. Drawing on a content analysis of 17,765 news items, a representative survey of 3272 respondents and 15 semi-structured interviews, we examine the dominant information sources about UK politics by longitudinally tracing coverage of devolved issues from 2007 to 2016, and gauging how well it was understood by television news viewers. Our results suggest that while BBC news is more sensitive to communicating the devolved relevance of news than more commercial outlets, there remains a democratic deficit in the supply of political information and audience understanding of where power and responsibility lies. If news coverage more regularly communicated the relevance and context of devolved issues, we argue it could open up democratic opportunities for citizens to consider a wider range of policy options debated in all four political institutions.

Does Public Service TV and the Intensity of the Political Information Environment Matter?

In recent years, a number of studies have suggested a positive linkage between public service broadcasting and public knowledge about current affairs. Most studies are, however, based on aggregate, cross-sectional data. On the individual level they fall short of establishing any causal linkage between TV news exposure and public knowledge. In addition, studies which investigate whether the intensity of the political information environment matters for learning effects from watching TV news, are missing. Against this background, this study compares knowledge effects from watching public service and commercial TV news in three contexts that vary in the intensity of the political information environment: a national election campaign, a European parliamentary election campaign and a non-election period. Among other things, the results show stronger knowledge effects from watching public service than commercial TV news.

Winners, Losers, and the Press: The Relationship Between Political Parallelism and the Legitimacy Gap

Recent work has explored how individual and institutional factors affect the gap in perceptions of political legitimacy between electoral winners and electoral losers, but has ignored the role that the political information environment, in general, and ideologically biased media, in particular, plays in exacerbating or diminishing this gap. By combining individual-level public opinion data in 28 countries, an expert survey on media systems, and a variety of country-level indicators, I find that higher levels of political parallelism in a country are associated with a larger winner-loser gap in institutional trust and satisfaction with democracy. The relationship is contingent on whether or not people are actually exposed to said media. This research, which links the study of political communication with the study of comparative political behavior, indicates that the increasing availability of partisan news around the world is a cause for concern.

Information Accessibility and Use as Correlates of Women Political Participation in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria

Information is a crucial ingredient for political participation. A lack of relevant, accurate and timely information may lead to poor or non-participation in the political process. Women in Nigeria are known for their low level participation in politics. Demographically they are more than men but their number fails to be translated to political strength. Recent survey shows that women constitute majority of voters but score very minimal success in political gains. They occupy very scanty leadership positions and are grossly underrepresented in the strategic height of politics. Women are also checked by cultural and traditional definitions. This paper concludes that lack of relevant information is responsible for this unwholesome state of their political position being so highly circumscribed. The paper recommends development of policies and intervention strategies that will improve the political information environment of women bringing about a more inclusive representative governance with implication for sustainable structural change leading to the generation of a more participative society.