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When Unfamiliarity Breeds Contempt: How Partisan Selective Exposure Sustains Oppositional Media Hostility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

ERIK PETERSON Open the ORCID record for ERIK PETERSON [Opens in a new window]  and
ALI KAGALWALA Open the ORCID record for ALI KAGALWALA [Opens in a new window]
ERIK PETERSON*
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
ALI KAGALWALA*
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
*
Erik Peterson, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, [email protected].
Ali Kagalwala, Graduate Student, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, [email protected].
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Abstract

Partisans hold unfavorable views of media they associate with the other party. They also avoid out-party news sources. We link these developments and argue that partisans assess out-party media based on negative and inaccurate stereotypes. This means cross-cutting exposure that challenges these misperceptions can improve assessments of out-party media. To support this argument, we use survey-linked web browsing data to show that the public has hostile views of out-party news sources they rarely encounter. We conduct three survey experiments that demonstrate cross-cutting exposure to nonpolitical or neutral political stories, forms of news widely available from online partisan sources, reduces oppositional media hostility. This explains how perceptions of rampant bias from out-party media coexist with more modest differences in the online content of major partisan news outlets. More broadly, we illustrate how negative misperceptions can sustain animus towards an out-group when people avoid encounters with them.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 585 - 598
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

The authors thank Jamie Druckman, Johanna Dunaway, Jonathan Mummolo, Matthew Hayes, Shanto Iyengar, Mike Tomz, Michelle Torres, Paul Sniderman, and participants at Rice University’s Texas American Politics Symposium for helpful comments and Texas A&M’s College of Liberal Arts, Stanford’s Laboratory for the Study of American Values, the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the Hoover Institution, and the Knight Foundation for financial support. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CCV1NN.

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