Hostname: page-component-669899f699-rg895 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-25T04:38:43.416Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abelson, RP, McGuire, WJ, Newcomb, TM, Rosenberg, M and Tannenbaum, PH (1967) Theories of Cognitive Consistency. Chicago: Rand McNally.Google Scholar
Adamic, LA and Glance, N (2005) The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery. Available at https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1134277.Google Scholar
Bakshy, E, Messing, S and Adamic, L (2015) Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science (New York, N.Y.) 348, 1130–1132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bourhis, RY, Giles, H, Leyens, JP and Tajfel, H (1979) Psycholinguistic distinctiveness: language divergence in Belgium. Language and Social Psychology 1, 158–185.Google Scholar
Branscome, NR, Schmitt, MT and Harvey, RD (1999) Perceiving pervasive discrimination among African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, 135–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Branscome, NR and Wann, DL (1994) Collective self-esteem consequences of outgroup derogation when a valued social identity is on trial. European Journal of Social Psychology 24, 641–657.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budak, C, Goel, S and Rao, JM (2016) Fair and balanced? Quantifying media bias through crowdsourced content analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly 80, 250–271.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crocker, J, Voelkl, K, Test, M and Major, B (1991) Social stigma: the affective consequences of attributional ambiguity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, 218–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Festinger, L (1957) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row & Peterson.Google Scholar
Flaxman, S, Goel, S and Rao, JM (2016) Filter bubbles, echo chambers and online news consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly 80, 298–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrett, RK, Gvirsman, SD, Johnston, BK, Tsfati, Y, Neo, R and Dal, A (2014) Implications of pro and counterattitudinal information exposure for affective polarization. Human Communication Research 40, 309–332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, An and King, G (1993) Why are American presidential campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable? British Journal of Political Science 23, 409–451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentzkow, M and Shapiro, JM (2011) Ideological segregation online and offline. Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, 1799–1839.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guess, AM (2015) Measure for measure: an experimental test of online political media exposure. Political Analysis 23, 59–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guess, AM (2018) (Almost) everything in moderation: new evidence on Americans' online media diets. Working Paper. Available at https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/aguess/Guess_OnlineMediaDiets.pdf.Google Scholar
Heider, F (1958) The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindman, M (2008) The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Iyengar, S (2018) Media Politics: A Citizen's Guide. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Iyengar, S and Hahn, KS (2009) Red media, blue media: evidence of ideological selectivity in media use. Journal of Communication 59, 19–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyengar, S, Lelkes, Y, Levendusky, M, Malhotra, N and Westwood, SJ (2019) The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 22, 129–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jost, JT, Glaser, J, Kruglanski, AW and Sulloway, FJ (2003) Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin 129, 339–375.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kalla, J and Broockman, D (2018) The minimal persuasive effects of campaign contact in general elections. American Political Science Review 112, 148–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klar, S, Krupnikov, Y and Ryan, J (2018) Affective polarization or partisan disdain? untangling a dislike for the opposing party from a dislike of partisanship. Public Opinion Quarterly 82, 379–390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawrence, E, Sides, J and Farrell, H (2010) Self-segregation or deliberation? Blog readership, participation and polarization in American politics. Perspectives on Politics 8, 141–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lazarsfeld, P, Berelson, B and Gaudet, H (1948) The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Levendusky, M (2013) How Partisan Media Polarize America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mason, L (2018) Uncivil Agreement: How Political Became Our Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mummolo, J (2016) News from the other side: how topic relevance limits the prevalence of partisan selective exposure. Journal of Politics 78, 763–773.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, E and Kagalwala, A (2019) When unfamiliarity breeds contempt: how partisan selective exposure sustains oppositional media hostility. Working Paper. Available at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2a7q9/.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pew Research Center (2012) Cable Leads the Pack as Campaign News Source (Pew Research Center Report). February 7, 2012. Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/legacy-pdf/2012-Communicating-Release.pdf.Google Scholar
Prior, M (2007) Post-Broadcast Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prior, M (2009) Improving media effects research through better measurement of news exposure. Journal of Politics 71, 893–908.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sears, DO and Freedman, JL (1967) Selective exposure to information. Public Opinion Quarterly 31, 194–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stroud, N (2010) Polarization and partisan selective exposure. Journal of Communication 60, 556–576.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stroud, NJ, Muddiman, A and Lee, JK (2014) Seeing media as group members: an evaluation of partisan bias perceptions. Journal of Communication 64, 874–894.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vavreck, L and Iyengar, S (2011) The future of political communication research. In Edwards, GC III, Shapiro, R and Jacobs, L (eds), Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and Media.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Peterson et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DEGC9Q
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Peterson et al. supplementary material

Peterson et al. supplementary material

Download Peterson et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 606.2 KB