Media Flashcards
(29 cards)
Farrell 2012
The consequences of the internet for politics
Thesis: the three primary effects of the internet are homophilous sorting, the lowering of transaction costs, and preference falsification/ Homophily is the most important effect.
The ‘internet’ is not homogenous, but includes a bundle of different platforms and causal mechanisms.
Homophilous sorting: We know that clustering happens, but less about the consequences of clustering- while Sunstein thinks it will make individuals more inward looking and extreme, Hargittai et al 2008 find that genuine political debate occurs across clusters, and polarisation seems not to increase over time.
Similar to Prior, the internet has produced a broad population that’s exposed to a broad variety of online sources, as well as a more specific and highly politically aware subgroup that preferentially seeks out partisan information.
Lowering transaction costs: might facilitate collective action (particularly decentralised forms), allow for groups with similar interests to form more easily, or incentivise actors to engage in cheap but showy forms of politics,
Preference falsification: people may be more able /not/ to falsify preferences in auth regimes. But given the threat of online backlash more controversial activists will often falsify their preferences- this may deter future controversial activism.
It’s therefore good for democratisation prospects- facilitated the AS.
When reading online one is likely to look at articles that a) one agrees with, and b) that are more sensational, clickbaity, low information.
Prior 2007
Cable television and polarisation
Thesis: the spread of cable television sorted between those who were interested in politics and tended to move toward strongly partisan news sources and those who were not and moved to channels with no political content.
TV news became dominated by the tastes of partisans.
Lawrence et al 2010: similar effect for consumers of political blogs. (from Farrell)
Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010
Thesis: contra Sunstein, both the Internet and traditional media are better at exposing people to dissenting points of view than are offline encounters via personal relationships. Even intense partisans are regularly exposed to other points of view online.
Guess 2021
Thesis: most people across the political spectrum have relatively moderate media diets, about a quarter of which consist of mainstream news websites and portals. But there’s a small group of partisans who account for a disproportionate amount of partisan traffic.
Most people aren’t looking at news (only 7-9% of web visits are hard news), and even when they are it isn’t usually political news.
Mutz and Reeves 2005
Video malaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust
Thesis: people like uncivil discourse, but this leads them to become less trusting of politicians and govt and less engaged.
Lecture: People also like negative news, even when they say they don’t (Trussler et. al.).
Luskin 1990
Causal direction problems: interest, media consumption, and knowledge.
From lecture: could be that interested people consume more media and become more knowledgeable. Could be that people who consume more media are more knowledgeable and interested. Could be that people who are more interested become more knowledgeable and consume more media
Effect on acquiring knowledge: ‘The estimates suggest that interest and intelligence, representing motivation and ability, have major effects, but that education and media exposure, the big informational variables, do not’. But unclear that their results on education hold water.
Lazarfeld et. al. 1944
People tend to seek out stories consistent with their prior attitudes, and prior partisanship in particular. The media reinforce these partisan choices, and one suppresses and distorts facts that detract from one’s views.
The people who were strongest partisans used to consume the most news. Esp because non-partisans find partisan media sources too biased and partisan, and get annoyed by the coverage.
Lect: Online news makes this more likely, thus a new era of minimal effects
Chong and Druckman 2007
Green belt experiment. Suggests that e.g. among existing environmentalists, whether they get a pro-economics or pro-environment frame affects whether they want green belt protection
Frame strength depends on whether the value is available in mind (e.g., whether people connect a value such as civil liberties to a hate group rally), accessible in mind (e.g., whether civil liberties actually come to mind), and applicable (e.g., whether the value of civil liberties is a compelling consideration with regard to the rally).
When frames come from more credible frames they have a much greater weight (e.g. a major local newspaper as opposed to a high school newspaper, when each discusses whether a hate group should be allowed to rally)
Where people experience competing frames they often cancel out (as in a competitive media environment)
Zaller 1992
Implications: 1. people that don’t pay much attention to news aren’t going to change their opinions (a substantial portion of the popn). 2. People who are politically aware and so already have strong opinions aren’t going to accept messages that conflict with those opinions. 3. People who are politically aware and already have lots of opinions will be less influenced by any one opinion that they receive.
People have to receive, happen to not be strong partisans, and then accept the message, to change views.
Among some people, this not only doesn’t change views, but moves people to extremes.
- Only extremists take in a lot of biased news
- This makes those extremists yet more extreme
Four axioms:
1. Reception Axiom: The greater a person’s level of cognitive
engagement with an issue, the more likely he or she is to be
exposed to and comprehend - in a word, to receive - political
messages concerning that issue.
2. Resistance Axiom: People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and their predispositions.
3. Accessibility Axiom: The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related considerations from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use.
4. Response Axiom: Individuals answer survey questions by
averaging across the considerations that are immediately
salient or accessible to them.
Counter-model: instead of people storing information and then evaluating it when asked their opinion they may keep a running tally of their impressions of someone or something—an on-line model (e.g. Lodge et al. 1989). This is more likely to occur for political sophisticates.
Kahneman
Thinking fast and slow
○ There is a distinction in psychology/behavioural econ “between the automatic, rapid, and effortless form of thought known as System 1 or type‐1 processing (henceforth S1), and the controlled, explicit and sequential form of thought known as System 2 or type‐2 processing (S2)”p243
§ When we recall something from short term memory, it’s usually using S1 and it’s only when questioned on it that we use S2 to verify
§ When we’re asked what 5x11 is we can answer quickly using S1 or ponder this more slowly using S2
Puglisi and Snyder 2011
Finding: Democrat leaning
papers are more likely to cover scandals involving Republican
politicians and vice versa, even controlling for readership.
Kellstedt 2000
Newsweek has applied
individualist (self-reliance) and egalitarian frames at different
rates to articles about race.
After controlling for persistence (autocorrelation), the likelihood of an egalitarian frame was higher when economic expectations were higher
Egalitarian frames led to more liberal racial policy preferences but individualistic ones had no effect.
Kalla and Broockman 2018
Systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments.
Thesis: “The best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and
advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general
elections is zero.”
“Persuasive effects only appear to emerge in two rare
circumstances
1. when candidates take unusually unpopular positions and
campaigns invest unusually heavily in identifying persuadable
voters.
2. when campaigns contact voters long before election day and
measure effects immediately—although this early persuasion
decays.”
Mudde 2018
Thesis: little basis for a draconian policy response on fake news in RW groups.
Evidence: Oxford Internet Institute and others found junk news concentrated in right wing groups
BUT: People who consume fake news consume more real news
I Nyhan and others: intense partisans look for fake news to confirm beliefs rather than to form them.
I Little evidence that fake news sways elections: just like the classic Lazarfeld “minimal effects” thesis
I So little basis for a draconian policy response, especially when
real news is sometimes mistaken
Flynn et. al. 2017
Misperceptions about politics
Thesis: ‘We argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which limits the effectiveness of corrective information about controversial issues and political figures’
Misperceptions about scientific, social and political facts
widespread.
I E.g. on climate change, MMR vaccination and autism,
genetically modified food, public spending rates.
I Misperceptions linked to partisanship, e.g. on presidential
power to control petrol prices
I Reactions to corrections differ by partisanship
I E.g. Absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 2003
interpreted as evidence they were never there by Democrats but
as having been destroyed by Republicans (Duefler 2004)
I Corrections can backfire most among those with high political
knowledge
I E.g. “death panel” corrections for high-knowledge Sarah Palin
supporters
Hopkins et. al. 2017
Finding: Newspaper coverage tended to reflect, rather than influence, public perceptions of the economy.
note: US based study- with a more dispersed media. I.e. fewer big national papers compared with the UK? Also: ‘We have studied only a subset of media outlets, with no attention to cable television, radio, social media, newspapers with smaller circulations, or other would-be sources of economic information.’
‘perceptions shift prior to national newspaper coverage. One explanation is that Americans are able to extract economic information from media coverage regardless of its tone; a second is that other sources of information— including media outlets with narrower, more targeted audiences, as well as actual economic conditions or social networks—prove influential.’
Goldstein and Ridout 2004
Hillsborough disaster and EU. post-1989
Thesis: Sun reading causes anti-EU stance.
Hillsborough there was a big boycott of the Sun esp around Liverpool, and thereby received less anti-EU framing than previously. People in Liverpool concurrently became more pro-EU.
CA: But there’s a lot going on here, e.g. an increase in anti-tory sentiment (partly related to Hillsborough).
Newton 2006
Thesis: minimal persuasive effects
the less politically aware are more likely to be swayed but less likely to actually interact with messages; the more aware are more likely to recognise that they have reasons not to accept the political message even though they are more likely to receive it.
Partisans, especially in polarised environments, are less likely to accept a countervailing message also.
the media will be highly constrained in which sides they can actually argue for, by both their readership and their pool of journalists- for they are generally motivated by profit and often can’t pay their journalists more to keep them if they go against their views
Chong and Druckman 2010
Decaying effects
Competing frames cancel each other out, but people tend to give more weight to messages they’ve heard recently, because their effects decay over time. People who use on-line methods give more weight to earlier considerations.
Barnes and Hicks 2018
Thesis: popular attitudes regarding austerity are influenced by media (and wider elite) framing
Finding: While voters who read certain newspapers are more likely to be pro/anti-austerity in accordance with their newspapers’ view, there is only a v small effect magnitude when they tried to establish a causal effect- suggests that readers go to newspapers they agree with, not v.v.
Hard to tell- it could be because people were already clear what they think at the time of the study.
Lenz and Lawson 2007
Thesis: Attractive political candidates are more successful. Tv amplified this effect.
Schaub and Morisi 2020
Finding: Populist parties more likely to attract voters with broadband in Italy and Germany- mainstraem parties don’t have this effect.
Scope claim: this occurs when there is a lack of access to the main political arenas (especially the national parliament), and exclusion from mainstream media coverage.’
Ladd and Lenz 2009
Finding: The switch of the Sun and other papers to Labour in 97 persuaded 10-25% of readers to switch to Labour.
Methodological pros:
Easier to measure individual exposure to press messages than in the US- fewer big papers, rather than hundreds of local papers.
Panel data rules out self-selection (of paper reading?) because they could measure which paper they wrote before the endorsement shifts in 96
The communication shift itself reduces the chances of self-selection (newspapers would have had to anticipate that their readers would vote labour before that even showed up in polling- the shift in the papers seemed to happen before that in the readership)
Large number of control subjects
Problems:
Panel attrition- conservative readers may have self-selected away before the papers even switched (though the readership of the papers didn’t shift in the 1992-6 period). And there was no disparity in labour and conservative supporters who dropped out 1992-7. [However, there was a high dropout rate (~45%), and this plausibly may have selected for high-political interest voters]
Particular political environment needed to allow papers to switch
Druckman and Lupia 2016
Preference Change in Competitive Political Environments
Thesis: (a) Many stimuli compete for every person’s attention, and (b) every person’s capacity to pay attention to information is limited. Thus voters use a variety of cues to make decision making easier
Where there is competing information, people use cues such as partisanship, ideology, group endorsements, polls, and appearance. People with high political knowledge tend to focus on ideology and endorsements more often, whereas those with low political knowledge focuses on partisanship and appearance. Higher political knowledge suggests a better use of cues (so that decisions are similar to those that would have been made without cues)
Two value dimensions that drive attitudes: hierarchy– egalitarianism (e.g., whether resources are distributed along differentiated or undifferentiated lines) and individualism–communitarianism (e.g., whether individuals are responsible for their own flourishing or whether the collective is charged with securing basic needs). There is often intense value-framing competition. When people are exposed to competing value frames, none of them wines- people fall back on their pre-existing values.
