Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference I: Going Negative: How Information Affects Attitudes

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference I

Session Description

A core question of democracy is how citizens get their information about politics and how that information affects what policies they want from politicians. Indeed, how citizens process the negative news that often dominates contemporary discussions of the economy is at the heart of the conference theme of how democracies can renew themselves in an era of political polarization.

This is a question of how media covers the news and how citizens process information about the state of the economy and society. The papers look at this overarching question from different perspectives. Three of the papers look at how people consume and react to news-like information, particularly negative news. Culpepper, Shandler and Lee look at how various negatively reported economic events – scandals, political capture, and instances of economic unfairness – differentially affect regulatory attitudes and propensity to participate in politics in four countries: France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. The paper by Pralle and Thorson considers how the negativity bias in media coverage shapes citizen knowledge and engagement by comparing the effects of information about successes and failures in three separate areas of American public policy: child health, the environment, and education. The paper by Soroka and Wlezien looks at how negativity bias can lead to media inaccuracy, or misinformation, in reporting about unemployment levels. Hicks, Jacobs and Matthews zero in on one particular type of information – about the level of inequality in the US – and consider how exposure to this information affects willingness to contribute to public goods, which it finds is reduced by reading about the true level of inequality. The paper also examines mechanisms behind this effect, finding evidence for arguments about system-fairness and political trust. Etienne and Mutz complement the other papers on the panel by looking at how the dynamics of public opinion shift with a change in partisanship of the White House.

Methodologically, the panel combines the use of surveys and survey experiments with the use of automated content analysis and data about macroeconomic aggregates, looking at both the macro-outputs of the media as well as informational effects at the individual level. Some of the papers focus on the United States alone, while others study the US in comparative context.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Cosponsor

• Division 38: Political Communication

Individual Presentations

• Nothing Beats a Good Scandal: Negative News and Attitudinal Change - Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford; Ryan Shandler; Taeku Lee, Harvard University

• Accuracy and Asymmetry in the News - Stuart N. Soroka, UCLA; Christopher Wlezien, University of Texas at Austin

• The Effects of Policy Successes vs. Policy Failures - Sarah B. Pralle, Syracuse University; Emily Thorson, Syracuse University

• Economic Inequality, Information, and Political Support for Public Goods - Timothy Hicks, University College London; Alan M. Jacobs, University of British Columbia; Scott Matthews, Memorial University

• The Dynamics of Policy Opinions When the Party in Power Changes - Tom W Etienne, University of Pennsylvania; Diana C. Mutz, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Taeku Lee Harvard University

Discussant

• Kris-Stella Trump Johns Hopkins University