11:20 - 13:00
P2
Room:
Room: South Room 220
Panel Session 2
Maxime Walder - News consumption and Voter's Polarization During Political Campaign
Davide Morisi - Ideological Asymmetries in Motivated Reasoning and the Mechanisms of Attitude Polarization
Teresa Völker, Daniel Saldivia Gonzatti - Discourse Networks and Discursive Opportunities of the Far-Right
Mike Cowburn - The Emerging Fault Line of Alternative: Intra-Party Division in Republican Representatives’ Media Engagement
News consumption and Voter's Polarization During Political Campaign
P2-2
Presented by: Maxime Walder
Nathalie Giger 1Maxime Walder 1, Jan Fivaz 2, Daniel Schwarz 2
1 University of Geneva
2 University of Bern
The link between news consumption and political attitudes is at the center of the most central challenged faced by western democracies nowadays. Growing literature shows that voters are embedded in echo-chambers in which they self select into a pool of news content pre-selected by algorithms in a media environment under economic pressure to produce more sensationalist than accurate information. In this challenging context, it is central to understand how the content voters' are exposed during electoral campaigns influence the evolution of their political attitudes and voting behavior. We use a two wave panel during a sub-national election and web-tracked parts of the survey respondents to evaluate how the news consumption of individual voters influence the evolution of their political attitudes and their vote choice during an election campaign. We show that while most voters select into news information with similar content, some use more various source of information and this directly impacts the evolution of voters' political attitudes.