15:00 - 16:40
P9-S238
Room: 1A.10
Chair/s:
ANNTIANA M SABETI
Discussant/s:
Giuliano Formisano
Media consumption and affective polarization
P9-S238-5
Presented by: Nathalie Giger
Nathalie Giger 1, Maxime Walder 1, Denise Traber 2
1 University of Geneva
2 University of Basel
News consumption is often regarded as a cornerstone of democracy, enabling citizens to stay informed about political processes and to make high-quality decisions during election campaigns. However, selective exposure to partisan news has been associated with higher levels of affective and ideological polarization. Most studies focus on the US, a country with a strong partisan media system and a bipartisan political system, facilitating both, the rise in selective exposure and increasing polarization. In this paper, we investigate how selective news exposure influences affective and ideological polarization in Switzerland, a multiparty system with high levels of polarization but a less partisan media landscape. Combining survey measures of news consumption with web-tracking data and Google search history data from two two-wave panel surveys, we show that selective exposure not only impacts the levels of affective polarization during political campaigns but leads to more polarized voting behavior. In doing so, this study sheds light on the complex and relationship between media consumption and current political divides.
Keywords: selective exposure, polarization, panel-data, web-tracking

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