National Media Systems, Affective Polarization, and Loyalty in Vote Choice: Contextualizing the Relationship Between News Media and Partisanship
Year: 2020
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Over the past three decades, partisanship has become an increasingly salient social identity for Americans, resulting in an electorate that is affectively polarized.An electorate characterized by affective polarization cuts against normative models of democracy, as party loyalists tend to dislike members of other parties, prefer confrontation to compromise, and distrust government when their preferred party is out of power.The commercial US media environment has been a frequent culprit in theories of the origins of affective polarization.Cross-national comparisons find that the United States may have experienced the most rapid gains in affective polarization but Americans' fixation on party identity is far from unique.This comparative analysis categorizes 14 countries' national media systems and tests whether news media consumption in commercial media systems, such as the United States, predicts higher levels of partisan animus and party loyalty in vote choice than media consumption in other types of media systems.The results indicate that television consumption in commercial media systems is associated with higher levels of partisan affect than in public-service or hybrid media systems.
Author: Wolken, Samuel
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Topic: Media Influence and Politics
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7002220839