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Partisan selective exposure in online news consumption: evidence from the 2016 presidential campaign

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2019

Erik Peterson Open the ORCID record for Erik Peterson [Opens in a new window] ,
Sharad Goel  and
Shanto Iyengar
Erik Peterson*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 77845-3424
Sharad Goel
Affiliation:
Department of Management Science & Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Shanto Iyengar
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Where do partisans get their election news in the contemporary media environment? We track the online news consumption of a national sample during the 2016 presidential campaign. We find levels of partisan isolation in news exposure are two to three times greater than in prior studies, although the absolute level of isolation remains modest. The partisan divide for election-related news exceeds the divide for non-political news. This tendency of partisans to follow like-minded news providers occurs despite the relatively small differences in the partisan slant of the content offered by the majority of sources they visited. Finally, we find that partisans who gravitated to congenial news providers did not shift their evaluations of the presidential candidates during the campaign.

Keywords

American politicsmass media and political communication
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 242 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019

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Peterson et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DEGC9Q
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