Political Processing Research Articles

Regulating Misinformation: Political Irrationality as a Feasibility Constraint

AbstractThis paper argues that the well-established fact of political irrationality imposes substantial constraints on how governments may combat the threat of political misinformation. Though attempts at regulating misinformation are becoming increasingly popular, both among policymakers and theorists, I intend to show that, for a wide range of anti-misinformation interventions (collectively termed “debunking” and “source labeling”), these attempts ought to be abandoned. My argument relies primarily on the fact that most people process politically-relevant information in biased and motivated ways. Since debunking or factual correction of politically relevant misinformation (as well as source labeling) themselves consist of providing politically-relevant information, they are also very likely to be processed in irrational ways. This makes it extremely difficult to effectively correct people’s political beliefs and political information processing. Since governments should not pursue policies likely to be futile, they should refrain from mandating such interventions. My conclusion is of relevance to considerable literature in digital ethics of misinformation. It shows that many celebrated works in the field ignore political irrationality and fail to consider its implications.

The more you know…? How disclosures, persuasion knowledge training, and political fit impact Cognitive processing of targeted political ads

Scholars and policymakers call for disclosures and educational training to enhance citizens’ critical coping with targeted political advertising. Empirically, however, the effectiveness of such measures remains unclear. Contributing to persuasion knowledge research, this study investigates how targeting disclosures, educational training, and political fit activate targeting knowledge and manipulative intent perceptions and how these, in turn, relate to party evaluation. Results from a 2x2x2 between-subjects experiment (N = 513) suggest that all independent variables increased targeting knowledge. Educational training increased manipulative intent perceptions; political fit decreased them. We found no interaction effects. Targeting knowledge positively correlated with party evaluation. Manipulative intent perceptions negatively correlated with party evaluation when political fit was low. We conclude that 1) targeting disclosures benefit targeting recognition, 2) educational training is not needed for recognizing but evaluating targeting, and 3) for both, individuals rely on political fit despite superior alternatives. Lastly, targeting within their voter base may benefit parties.

Pengaruh Kemahiran Literasi Media dalam Konteks Pengundi Muda Baharu di Malaysia

The Influence of Political Information Processing Skills among New Young Voters in Malaysia ABSTRACT: The eligible voters age limit from 21 years to 18 years and triggered the issue of political participation readiness among new young voters in Malaysia. This study claims that media literacy skills from political information process dimension influence the political participation readiness. This study aims to evaluate the influence of media literacy skills from political information process dimension towards political participation readiness. There are seven political information process skills that are verified such as analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis and abstract. By using survey and simple random sampling towards 547 respondents aged 18 to 26 years, this study, strategize data collection to represent the population of new young voters in Malaysia. The map of Malaysia is divided into North, South, East, West and Borneo Zones covering urban and rural areas. This study reported that the skills of induction, deduction and synthesis have positive influence towards political participation readiness among new young voters in Malaysia. However, the skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping and abstracting do not have any significant influence. This study suggests a strategic collaboration between the Ministry of Youth and Sports with the Malaysian Election Commission, the Ministry of Communications and the Ministry of Digital in the National Service Training Program (PLKN). This initiative is expected increase the level of political participation readiness among new young voters in Malaysia. Keywords: Media literacy, new young voters, political information processing skills, political participation, voting.

The Influence of Eudaimonic Entertainment Experiences on Political Information Processing and Engagement

Can entertainment serve as a gateway to political interest and participation? In this paper, we examine the specific case of eudaimonic entertainment experiences (i.e., meaningful, moving, and thought-provoking entertainment experiences). To systematically analyze the influence of experiential and contextual factors associated with eudaimonic entertainment on political information processing, issue interest, and participation intentions, we conducted three experiments. Study 1 replicated positive effects of affective factors (arousal, negative valence, mixed affect, empathy, and feeling moved) on reflective thoughts, issue interest, and political participation intentions. Study 2 found positive associations of perceived personal relevance with reflective thoughts, issue interest, and political participation intentions. Study 3 found negative effects of absorption of cognitive resources on reflective thoughts, issue interest, and political participation intentions. The experimental variation of cognitive resources in Study 3 also allowed us to observe a reverse causal effect of reflective thoughts on affective factors.

A Conservative (R)Evolution? Constitutional–Political Crises, Trumpism, and Long-standing Trends of Conservative Transformations in the United States and Beyond

Starting from the most current developments in the legal and political processing of Donald J. Trump’s (post)presidency, this contribution highlights the persisting challenges to the constitutional, social, and political stability of democracy in the United States (U.S.). In particular, it outlines several dimensions of an enabling environment in which Trump(ism) could thrive. A key feature of this is the thorough and ever-growing asymmetry that has come to characterize the partisan political context in the United States and that directs our attention to the conservative side of the political spectrum: the Republican Party as its major organizational embodiment, as well as broader trends of conservative (trans)formation, including those related to the electorate, policies, institutions, civil society, and the media. Thus, this contribution underlines the importance of the multiple and often longer-term influences, conflicts, institutions, and conditions conducive to current developments, including, in particular, the range of actors that have been relevant in shaping them. Asymmetric polarization, economic inequality, and nationalist and anti-government (authoritarian–populist) tendencies and movements are among the factors that together pose the most serious threat to liberal democracy in the United States—and in “the West” more broadly. The introduction illustrates the importance of studying and reflecting upon the implications of the above trends, actors, and conditions for Germany and other European states, for transatlantic cooperation, and even for the global multilateral system as a whole. It concludes with an overview of the research articles in the special issue, outlining their individual as well as overlapping analytical interests and contributions.

Liberal Democratic Law, the Ethics of Civility, and Agonistic Politics between Hegemony and Compromise

This article brings Van der Walt’s argument on the importance of an ‘ethics of civility’ in liberal democracies into dialogue with agonistic democratic theory. While agonists agree with Van der Walt that democracy requires citizens’ readiness to live with views that they do not consider ‘reasonable enough,’ they focus on the political processing of conflicts among political actors with opposing views of what is reasonable. The article argues that agonism may be a suitable complement to Van der Walt’s argument, because it shows how politics can help foster citizens’ willingness to act according to the demands of an ‘ethics of civility.’ It refers to Chantal Mouffe’s and James Tully’s agonistic theories and shows that both describe forms of conflict processing that prevent situations in which an ‘ethics of civility’ would demand too unequally distributed sacrifices: continued hegemonic struggle in the case of Mouffe and compromise in the case of Tully.

Factors Influencing Young Malaysians’ Political Information Seeking Behaviour on Twitter

Youth participation in political discourses is an important element that needs to be looked into urgently in Malaysia. This is especially so with the historical milestone of the Undi18 constitutional amendment allowing youth from 18 years old to vote in the 15th General Election. This research was initiated to investigate the youth's behaviour in terms of attitude, awareness, and involvement in politics via social media, specifically Twitter. In this study, involvement in politics is described as youths' political information seeking behaviour on Twitter in relation to political attitudes such as political self-efficacy, situational political involvement, government trust, and processing of information, that is perceived information quality. An online survey form was disseminated across Twitter using snowball sampling for Klang Valley Twitter users aged between 18 to 30. The results garnered from 314 respondents revealed significant relationships between independent variables (self-efficacy, situational, political involvement, government trust, and information quality) and the dependent variable (Twitter motivation). It was hoped that this study would help researchers better grasp the pattern on how Malaysian youth use Twitter to get political information. This study may also provide important information on the online diffusion and consumption of political information through social media like Twitter. Keywords: Political information-seeking behaviour, processing information, youth, Twitter, Malaysia.

Institutionalisierung und Transformation: Bildungs- und Lernprozesse in und von (Protest-)Bewegungen

The corona-pandemic demonstrates that times of crisis are characterized by their specific dynamic especially through their social and political processing. They are often accompanied by an increased or more visible civil society engagement. This can result in further social changes, such as protests or demonstrations resulting in political or media debates. The actors involved – e. g. the current Fridays for Future movement - are important for the targeted change, as well as the organizational structures and the context (opportunity structures) that determines civil society actions. What significance do social movements have for sustainable (social) development and to what extent can they be understood as social and individual learning or educational spaces? In this paper, I present central theoretical strands of the research on social movements and their development. Then I focus on the associated learning and educational processes in and for movements and the actors involved. The example of ecological movements and Fridays for Future illustrates how social transformation and individual engagement and learning are related to one another.

Ideological and Partisan Bias in the Canadian Public

AbstractPartisan and affective polarization should have observable consequences in Canada, such as bias in political information search and processing. This article presents the results of three studies that test for partisan and ideological bias using the Digital Democracy Project's study of the 2019 Canadian election. Study 1 uses a conjoint experiment where respondents choose from pairs of hypothetical news stories where the slant of the source and headline are both randomized. Study 2 tests for partisan-motivated responsiveness to elite cues with a policy vignette that manipulates the presence of party elite cues and a motivational prime. Study 3 requires respondents to solve a randomly assigned numeracy task that is either political or nonpolitical in nature. Results suggest that Canadians (1) select politically congenial information, though not sources of such information, (2) follow elite cues when partisan motivation is primed and (3) evaluate evidence in ways that are biased by their ideological beliefs.

What you expect is (not) what you get: the impact of initial and post-hoc judgments of message characteristics on political information recall

ABSTRACT How does a political text’s complexity – as a crucial characteristic of a text – uniquely affect readers’ political information processing? Based on a metacognitive response framework and extant discussions based on the Heuristic-Systematic Model vs. the Elaboration Likelihood Model, we tested whether a reader’s initial expectation of a message characteristic and stable individual differences intersect with the metacognitive processing fluency experience. Do people recall more information from the news when presented with articles that are more – or less – complex than they expected, or do they recall more information when expectations of article complexity are met? And for whom is this more likely to occur? Our results provide strong support for the notion that objective complexity is indeed the main driver of metacognitive perceptual processing fluency and information recall, while also rending partial support for the role of (in)congruency in this process. The results also showed that individual differences in processing capabilities play a significant role in shaping information recall. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications.

Motivated Reasoning in Identity Politics: Group Status as a Moderator of Political Motivations

Western democracies are increasingly defined by identity politics, where politics appeals to both political and other social identities. Consequently, political information processing should depend not just on political identity, but also on other identities, such as gender, race, or sexuality. For any given issue, we argue that the extent to which reasoning is motivated by one’s political identity depends on citizens’ group status in other relevant identities, that is, that political identity more strongly motivates high-status group members than low-status group members for issues of identity politics. A survey experiment (N = 1012) concerning a gender quota policy shows that political identity motivates men more strongly than women, leading to political polarization between left-wing and right-wing men, but not women. This suggests that political motivated reasoning should be addressed differently in situations of identity politics, and urges the consideration of group status as a conditional factor of motivated reasoning.

Still Images—Moving People? How Media Images of Protest Issues and Movements Influence Participatory Intentions

While media images can ease political information perception and processing, the impact of images on behavioral intentions to engage in protest is relatively unexplored. We ask: Under what conditions can news images of protest “move” people and affect the willingness to participate? Aiming to answer this question from an information-processing perspective, we shed light on the nexus between spontaneous, sensory behavior and cognition in response to news media images of protest. We conducted a multigroup experiment in which 143 recipients were randomly exposed to four news images of protest and their visual attention monitored. Multilevel regressions indicate that viewers fixate on images of protest prior to accompanying texts. When exposed to protest images with a negative valence, an increase in the observation duration for protest images increases the recipient’s willingness to participate. Contrariwise, when viewing protest images with a positive valence, a longer observation duration does not increase participatory intentions. Irrespective of image valence, the greater the salience that viewers subjectively ascribed to the image, the greater their willingness to protest concerning the depicted issue. Our analysis also reveals a cross-level interaction effect indicating that the impact of image observation duration on the willingness to engage is conditional on individual levels of political interest: The positive effect of observing protest images on the willingness to protest is especially increased, if an individual is highly politically interested. These results indicate that, under certain conditions, media images are efficient carriers of political content that can motivate citizens to protest.

Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content

People tend to interpret political information in a manner that confirms their prior beliefs, a cognitive bias that contributes to rising political polarization. In this study, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with semantic content analyses to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real-world political content. We scanned American participants with conservative-leaning or liberal-leaning immigration attitudes while they watched news clips, campaign ads, and public speeches related to immigration policy. We searched for evidence of "neural polarization": activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content. Neural polarization in the DMPFC intensified during moments in the videos that included risk-related and moral-emotional language, highlighting content features most likely to drive divergent interpretations between conservatives and liberals. Finally, participants whose DMPFC activity closely matched that of the average conservative or the average liberal participant were more likely to change their attitudes in the direction of that group's position. Our work introduces a multimethod approach to study the neural basis of political cognition in naturalistic settings. Using this approach, we characterize how political attitudes biased information processing in the brain, the language most likely to drive polarized neural responses, and the consequences of biased processing for attitude change. Together, these results shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.

The Two Faces of Party Ambiguity: A Comprehensive Model of Ambiguous Party Position Perceptions

AbstractRecent research on electoral behavior has suggested that policy-informed vote choices are frequently obstructed by uncertainty about party positions. Given the significance of clear and distinct party platforms for meaningful representation, several studies have investigated the conditions under which parties are perceived as ambiguous. Yet previous studies have often relied on measures of perceived positional ambiguity that are fairly remote from the concept, casting doubt on their substantive conclusions. This article introduces a statistical model to estimate a comprehensive measure of perceived ambiguity that incorporates the two principal factors: non-positions and positional inconsistency. The two-faces model employs issue perceptions in an item response framework to explicitly parametrize the perceived ambiguity of party positions. The model is applied to data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and subsequently associated with party characteristics that drive perceptions of party ambiguity. The results suggest that (a) there are notable differences between the proposed and competing measures, highlighting the need to be mindful of the intricacies of political information processing in research on perceptions of ambiguity and (b) involuntary ambiguity might be an underexplored explanation for unclear party perceptions.

Model Analysis of Political Message Processing of Prabowo-Hatta and Jokowi-JK in the Indonesian Presidential Election 2014 in West Jakarta

This research analyzed the political message processing of the voters of Prabowo-Hatta and Jokowi-JK in the Presidential Election 2014 in West Jakarta. The aim was to determine the influence of systematic and heuristic political message processing in the decision of beginner voters. Also, it targeted the political message processing model in the Presidential Election 2014. Quantitative research was used by conducting a survey and heuristic-systematic model was picked as the theory. It was derived into three variables, namely heuristic process variable, systematic process variable, and decision to choose president variable,. The result showed that the decision to vote Prabowo-Hatta was influenced more by systematic than heuristic political messages. On the other hand, the decision to elect Jokowi-JK was influenced more by heuristic than systematic political messages. If Prabowo-Hatta wished to improve their voters, they could strengthen the heuristic political message (emotional message), while for Jokowi / JK, they could strengthen the systematic political message (rational message).

Correction to Habib, Adelman, Leidner, Pasha, and Sibii (2019)

Free AccessCorrection to Habib, Adelman, Leidner, Pasha, and Sibii (2019)Corrections for this articlePerpetrator Religion and Perceiver’s Political Ideology Affect Processing and Communication of Media Reports of ViolencePublished Online:October 07, 2019https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000400PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInReddit SectionsMoreThe article entitled “Perpetrator religion and perceiver’s political ideology affect processing and communication of media reports of violence” by S. Habib, L. Adelman, B. Leidner, S. Pasha, & R. Sibii (Social Psychology,https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000385) contained an error on page 1.The correct affiliations are as follows:Razvan SibiiJournalism Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USASamia HabibDepartment of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health, MA, USAWe regret any inconvenience or confusion this error may have caused.References Habib, S., Adelman, L., Leidner, B., Pasha, S., & Sibii, R. (2019). Perpetrator religion and perceiver’s political ideology affect processing and communication of media reports of violence. Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000385 First citation in articleLink, Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsRelated articlesPerpetrator Religion and Perceiver’s Political Ideology Affect Processing and Communication of Media Reports of ViolenceJuly 01, 2019Social Psychology Volume 51Issue 1January 2020ISSN: 1864-9335eISSN: 2151-2590 Published onlineOctober 7, 2019 InformationSocial Psychology (2019), 51, pp. 76-76 https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000400.© 2019Hogrefe PublishingPDF download

Politikvermittlung an der Schnittstelle von Unterhaltung und Information : Political communication at the interface of entertainment and information

This article presents an extended dual-process model of entertainment effects on political information processing and engagement. We suggest that entertainment consumption can either be driven by hedonic, escapist motivations that are associated with a superficial mode of information processing, or by eudaimonic, truth-seeking motivations that prompt more elaborate forms of information processing. This framework offers substantial extensions to existing dual-process models of entertainment by conceptualizing the effects of entertainment on active and reflective forms of information seeking, knowledge acquisition and political participation.

Politikvermittlung an der Schnittstelle von Unterhaltung und Information : Political communication at the interface of entertainment and information

This article presents an extended dual-process model of entertainment effects on political information processing and engagement. We suggest that entertainment consumption can either be driven by hedonic, escapist motivations that are associated with a superficial mode of information processing, or by eudaimonic, truth-seeking motivations that prompt more elaborate forms of information processing. This framework offers substantial extensions to existing dual-process models of entertainment by conceptualizing the effects of entertainment on active and reflective forms of information seeking, knowledge acquisition and political participation.

Social media and microtargeting: Political data processing and the consequences for Germany

Amongst other methods, political campaigns employ microtargeting, a specific technique used to address the individual voter. In the US, microtargeting relies on a broad set of collected data about the individual. However, due to the unavailability of comparable data in Germany, the practice of microtargeting is far more challenging. Citizens in Germany widely treat social media platforms as a means for political debate. The digital traces they leave through their interactions provide a rich information pool, which can create the necessary conditions for political microtargeting following appropriate algorithmic processing. More specifically, data mining techniques enable information gathering about a people's general opinion, party preferences and other non-political characteristics. Through the application of data-intensive algorithms, it is possible to cluster users in respect of common attributes, and through profiling identify whom and how to influence. Applying machine learning algorithms, this paper explores the possibility to identify micro groups of users, which can potentially be targeted with special campaign messages, and how this approach can be expanded to large parts of the electorate. Lastly, based on these technical capabilities, we discuss the ethical and political implications for the German political system.

Auf den Schultern des EU-Projektes gegen den „Status Quo“

The article discusses the rise of authoritarian populism in the context of Turkeys neoliberalisation experience since 1980. For long time, populist politics in Turkey successfully claimed to be the voice of the suppressed against the ruling. In fact, they used an oppositional political language meanwhile processing the material interests of the hegemonic forces. Despite receiving considerable support, particularly from the European public, authoritarian populism fell into an deep crises throughout the recent years – the result is it radicalisation which is often mistakenly debated as the start of populism in Turkey.