Kate Kenski
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 175092 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kate Kenski |
| NOMBRES | Kate |
| APELLIDO | Kenski |
| FIRMA | KENSKI K |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Arizona |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6064-791X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 59 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 311 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 54 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The Irony of Sophisticated Citizens and Misinformation
Although prior studies demonstrate that less politically sophisticated citizens tend to fall for “fake news,” it is less clear how high need for cognition citizens who enjoy effortful thinking are influenced by misinformation. To address this gap, the current study analyzes data from a two-wave panel survey collected before and after the 2020 presidential election in the U.S. Our model explains (a) how social media news use increases political cy…
Misinformation exposure per se may not trigger cynicism, but perceived prevalence of misinformation and hostile information does
Incivility in Online Discussion as a Collective Phenomenon
Drawing from dynamic systems theory, we examine how incivility is collectively constructed in an online discussion community. Using secondary data consisting of comments shared over a 3-week period to an online news community, we identified three sequences that reflect collective incivility practices. Whereas the persistent incivility sequence included a large proportion of uncivil comments, incivility occurred infrequently in the sporadic incivi…
Reinforcing Cycles? Empirical Reflections on the Relationship Between Media Cynicism and Political Cynicism
Examining the Dynamics of Uncivil Discourse Between Sub-National Political Officials and the Public on Twitter
Despite agreement about the challenges posed by incivility for democratic discourse, much remains to be learned about how incivility manifests in interactions between the public and political elites. We examine the connections between top-down and bottom-up incivility among 22 local and state elected officials and the public over an 18-month period on Twitter. Our analyses show that incivility in a tweet from an elected official significantly inc…
Engagement with partisan Russian troll tweets during the 2016 U.S. presidential election
Operatives working for the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) infiltrated social media with the goal of disrupting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We investigate how these operatives or “trolls” leveraged partisan political identities in discussing presidential candidates and parties on Twitter. Adopting a social identity lens, we conceptualize retweeting troll content as a form of identity performance and examine the message properties …
Engagement with incivility in tweets from and directed at local elected officials
Although social media have created novel opportunities for the public and local elected officials representing city or state governments to interact, concerns have been raised about the tenor of their discourse. We used machine learning in this project to identify the presence of incivility in tweets (N = 38,218) made by and directed at local officials representing a metropolitan area over an 18-month period and examine its implications. Compared…
Democracy amid Crises
Fostering learning among women
The gender political knowledge gap has proven to be persistent and pervasive. It extends across time, geography, and cultures. When it comes to national politics, women demonstrate lower political knowledge than men, and this has a detrimental effect on a deliberative democracy. The current study employed an elaborative and political socialization theoretical perspective in addressing the gender political knowledge gap. Through an experimental de…
Candidate Evaluations and Social Media Following during the 2020 Presidential Campaign
This study investigates the relationship between presidential candidate evaluations and following the candidates on five social media (SM) platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Analyses of national survey data collected during the 2020 presidential campaign (N = 2,120) suggest that following a candidate on SM is positively associated with feelings toward that candidate, even after gender, age, race, education, party iden…
Tipping the Twitter vs. News Media Scale? Conducting a Third Assessment of Intermedia Agenda-Setting Effects during the Presidential Nomination Season
Two previous studies investigated the relationship between newspaper issue agendas and those of candidate and campaign Twitter feeds during the presidential nomination seasons in 2012 and 2016. Both found the intermedia agenda-setting power resided with newspapers. This study replicates the previous two by examining the issue agendas of the nation’s top newspapers and those of candidate and campaign Twitter feeds during the 2020 presidential nomi…
Closing the Knowledge Gap
One mechanism by which citizens learn about candidates and issues is through watching presidential debates. Some scholars have raised concerns that these events, however, disproportionately benefit those already high in political knowledge more so than others with lesser knowledge levels. We hypothesize that knowledge begets knowledge because it prompts a constructive cognitive process that results from elaboration and reflection. We test this hy…
Why Do People Share Political Information on Social Media
This study investigates factors predicting political information sharing on social media in the election context. Specifically, the current study examines how users’ six motivations for political information sharing and exposure to political disagreement on social media predict their political information sharing behaviors. Analyses of national survey data collected before the 2018 U.S. midterm election suggest that criticism, informing, and soci…
Flexible versus structured support for reasoning
Structured analytic techniques (SATs) help the intelligence community reduce flaws in cognition that lead to faulty reasoning. To ascertain whether SATs provide benefits to reasoning we conducted an experiment within a web-based application, comparing three conditions: 1) unaided reasoning, 2) a prototypical order-based SAT and 3) a flexible, process-based SAT that we call TRACE. Our findings suggest that the more flexible SAT generated higher qu…
Unfriending and Muting During Elections
Although selective avoidance, commonly practiced as unfriending and muting on social media, has been assumed to be at odds with the democratic ideal of deliberation, academic literature says little about its antecedents and consequences. Drawing from the framework of psychological needs for information processing, we examine whether need for cognition and need to evaluate interact to predict selective avoidance, which then facilitates political e…
Social Norms and the Dynamics of Online Incivility
Online discussions are performed in the gaze of fellow users. To increase engagement, platforms typically let these users evaluate the comments made by others through rating systems (e.g., via Likes or Down/Up votes). Understanding how such ratings shape, and are shaped by, features of the underlying discussion is important for our understanding of online behavior. In this study, we focus on an increasingly concerning aspect of online discussions…
Assessing the Russian Troll Efforts to Sow Discord on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. Election
Although experts agree that the Russian Internet Research Agency deployed trolls on Twitter to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election, questions remain about the nuances of their efforts. We examined almost 350,000 original tweets made during the two-year electoral cycle to investigate the emphasis, timing, content, and partisanship of the trolls’ efforts targeting leading candidates. Despite only dedicating a fraction of their tweets to can…
Perceptions of Uncivil Discourse Online
Incivility in public discourse has become a pressing concern of citizens and scholars alike, but most research has focused narrowly on incivility in elite discourse. The present study examines how the lay public perceives incivility, using two surveys to track differences in perceptions of specific types of uncivil speech and identify predictors of those perceptions. The results show that different types of incivility elicit different responses. …
Reliable Sources” in Cable News
News coverage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and President Obama’s announced Clean Power Plan (CPP) served as data for two case studies. Social network analysis was used to investigate the sources used by cable giants CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Both case studies show the extent of sourcing varies across the three news outlets, with CNN using the smallest network, MSNBC using the largest, and Fox falling somewhere in betw…
Perceptions of mis- or disinformation exposure predict political cynicism
Despite a fast-growing body of literature on fake news and mis-/disinformation, there remains surprisingly little empirical work on the social/political consequences of exposure to false information. Addressing this issue, this study provides initial evidence that perceptions of false information exposure catalyze political cynicism. The findings from a two-wave panel survey during the 2018 US midterm elections reveal that perceptions of false in…
Perceptions of Incivility in Public Discourse
Although concerns over incivility in public discourse are widely shared by citizens and scholars alike, there is lack of consensus over what incivility is. This chapter examines how the lay public perceives incivility in online comments, using an online survey to track differences in perceptions of specific types of uncivil speech. This chapter focuses on name-calling, vulgarity, lying accusations, pejoratives for speech, and aspersion. The autho…
Anything But Grand
This essay responds to arguments made by Roderick P. Hart about how campaigns should be evaluated and argues that the 2016 election was not a fine campaign. It discusses the merits of “republican” criteria for evaluating campaign quality and contends that some of the new criteria proposed by Hart are useful insofar as they serve these republican ideals. The essay ends by arguing that even if scholars were to adopt Hart’s proposed standards for ev…
The relationship between race competitiveness, standing in the polls, and social media communication strategies during the 2014 U.S. gubernatorial campaigns
Political campaigns have been systematically using social media for strategic advantage. However, little is known about how competitiveness affects the ways candidates communicate online. Our study analyzes how race competitiveness as measured by polling performance influences candidates’ strategies on Twitter and Facebook. We analyze all social media messages of Republican and Democratic candidates in states that held gubernatorial elections in …
Lying, Liars, and Lies
Incivility is a growing concern among Americans and a burgeoning topic of scholarly research. The current study investigates the extent to which incivility via lying accusations was present in major party candidate and campaign expressions on Twitter during the invisible primary season preceding the 2016 presidential election. All tweets on verified major party candidate and campaign Twitter feeds were collected from March 5, 2015 through Decembe…
The Candidate
Campaigns are won by candidates who have loyal, adept staff who help communicate their visions to the public. When experienced and charismatic personalities fail to acquire such team support, their
The Rise of Twitter in the Political Campaign
Questions exist over the extent to which social media content may bypass, follow, or attract the attention of traditional media. This study sheds light on such dynamics by examining intermedia agenda-setting effects among the Twitter feeds of the 2012 presidential primary candidates, Twitter feeds of the Republican and Democratic parties, and articles published in the nation's top newspapers. Daily issue frequencies within media were analyzed usi…
Issue Saliency and Gender Stereotypes
Objective. This article examines how issue saliency affects the public's perceptions of whether a man or a woman would make a better president when considering the most important problem facing the nation. Method. The study uses telephone survey data of adults in the United States collected by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in September 2003. Multinominial logistic regression models were conducted to parse out the effects of issue saliency on…
Incivility and Political Identity on the Internet
Although incivility is an increasing concern among scholars and the public, explanations for this phenomenon sometimes overlook the role of computer-mediated communication. Drawing from the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE), we consider incivility as a form of identity performance occurring in the visually anonymous contexts that are typical online. Specifically, we examine partisan political identities and intergroup factor…
Social Norms and the Dynamics of Online Incivility
Online discussions are performed in the gaze of fellow users. To increase engagement, platforms typically let these users evaluate the comments made by others through rating systems (e.g., via Likes or Down/Up votes). Understanding how such ratings shape, and are shaped by, features of the underlying discussion is important for our understanding of online behavior. In this study, we focus on an increasingly concerning aspect of online discussions…
Reassessing Twitter’s Agenda-Building Power
This study examined the relationship between elite news media agendas and campaign agendas during the 2016 presidential primary season. Computer-assisted content analysis was used to assess issue emphasis within Twitter feeds of U.S. presidential primary candidates and their campaigns as well as the nation’s top newspapers. The relationship between the overall Twitter agenda and that of newspapers, as well as the influence of front-runners Clinto…
Perceptions of mis- or disinformation exposure predict political cynicism
Despite a fast-growing body of literature on fake news and mis-/disinformation, there remains surprisingly little empirical work on the social/political consequences of exposure to false information. Addressing this issue, this study provides initial evidence that perceptions of false information exposure catalyze political cynicism. The findings from a two-wave panel survey during the 2018 US midterm elections reveal that perceptions of false in…
Twitter Use by Presidential Primary Candidates During the 2012 Campaign
This study examines Twitter use by presidential candidates during the 2012 primary election. The Twitter feeds and activity levels of candidates from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and Americans Elect parties and their campaigns were gathered over a 3-month span. Variables examined include the number of tweets posted, followers gained, and followers added as well as the occurrence of hashtags, user mentions, hyperlinks, and content cate…
Who Watches Presidential Debates? A Comparative Analysis of Presidential Debate Viewing in 2000 and 2004
Presidential debates are a main feature of present-day presidential campaigns. For voters, they are a source of political learning about candidate issue positions. Fluctuations in the level of debate viewership from election to election and, within an election, from debate to debate invite the following questions: What is the composition of debate audiences? In what ways did the audiences in 2004 differ from 2000? In what ways did the audiences c…
Women and Political Knowledge During the 2000 Primaries
Prior research on political knowledge has found repeatedly that women do not perform as well as men on political affairs questions. The present study analyzed survey responses collected between 14 December 1999 and 8 March 2000 on political knowledge items about the issue positions and backgrounds of candidates Bradley, Gore, and McCain. Even when several sociodemographic variables were controlled for, gender was a significant predictor of politi…
Sexism Versus Partisanship
Of What Is That Glass Ceiling Made
Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study examines the predictors of reporting that a woman or man would do a better job as president considering the national issue most important to the respondent. Gender, education, and ideology are strong predictors of presidential gender preference. Naming health care as the most important problem facing the nation is positively associated with believing a female president would …
Lying, Liars, and Lies
Incivility is a growing concern among Americans and a burgeoning topic of scholarly research. The current study investigates the extent to which incivility via lying accusations was present in major party candidate and campaign expressions on Twitter during the invisible primary season preceding the 2016 presidential election. All tweets on verified major party candidate and campaign Twitter feeds were collected from March 5, 2015 through Decembe…
The Effects of Candidate Age in the 2008 Presidential Election
Using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), this study finds that during the general election, adults in the United States were more likely to report that John McCain, who was 71 during the 2008 primaries and 72 in the general election, was “too old to be president” than to report that Barack Obama was “too young to be president.” The percentage of the population subscribing to these views was not a constant in the general…
From Agenda Setting to Refusal Setting
Past research suggests that there is a relationship between survey response and topic salience, namely that individuals responding to a survey are likely to find the survey topic more salient than nonrespondents do. For election surveys, nonresponse resulting from a lack of salience can influence findings because respondents may be more interested in politics than nonrespondents. The agenda-setting model suggests that media coverage should height…
Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates in 2008
In this study, the authors examine the composition of the audiences for the presidential and vice presidential debates in 2008. Results from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey show that the size of the vice presidential debate-viewing audience in 2008 exceeded the sizes of the presidential debate-viewing audiences, which is atypical from prior campaign seasons. The same general demographic and political characteristics that have driven p…
Hispanic Voters in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential General Elections
In 2004, the vote margin between the major party presidential candidates was slim but wider than in 2000, leading scholars, pundits, and politicians to ask: among which demographic groups did George W. Bush specifically and the Republican party more generally make gains? Using data from the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES), we examine the extent to which Bush and the Republicans made gains among an increasingly important g…
The Palin Effect and Vote Preference in the 2008 Presidential Election
Previous studies suggest that vice presidential candidates have little impact on the presidential vote. Using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), the author examines the extent to which the vice presidential selections from the two major parties had an impact on the presidential vote in 2008. The results show that vice presidential nominees' favorability ratings were significantly related to vote preference. In addition,…
Engagement with incivility in tweets from and directed at local elected officials
Although social media have created novel opportunities for the public and local elected officials representing city or state governments to interact, concerns have been raised about the tenor of their discourse. We used machine learning in this project to identify the presence of incivility in tweets (N = 38,218) made by and directed at local officials representing a metropolitan area over an 18-month period and examine its implications. Compared…
Unfriending and Muting During Elections
Although selective avoidance, commonly practiced as unfriending and muting on social media, has been assumed to be at odds with the democratic ideal of deliberation, academic literature says little about its antecedents and consequences. Drawing from the framework of psychological needs for information processing, we examine whether need for cognition and need to evaluate interact to predict selective avoidance, which then facilitates political e…
Assessing the Russian Troll Efforts to Sow Discord on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. Election
Although experts agree that the Russian Internet Research Agency deployed trolls on Twitter to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election, questions remain about the nuances of their efforts. We examined almost 350,000 original tweets made during the two-year electoral cycle to investigate the emphasis, timing, content, and partisanship of the trolls’ efforts targeting leading candidates. Despite only dedicating a fraction of their tweets to can…
Reliable Sources” in Cable News
News coverage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and President Obama’s announced Clean Power Plan (CPP) served as data for two case studies. Social network analysis was used to investigate the sources used by cable giants CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Both case studies show the extent of sourcing varies across the three news outlets, with CNN using the smallest network, MSNBC using the largest, and Fox falling somewhere in betw…
The Gatekeeping of Political Messages
Simply put, gatekeeping involves deciding which messages to send to others and how to shape them. Billions of events occur each day, many with political ramifications, but there are more events than the news media can cover or even know about. Political information competes with all other topics to pass through source and media gates. Politicians create forces that constrain or facilitate this passage, but making it through one gate is usually no…
Gender and Time of Voting Decision
Scholars and the media have long been concerned about gender gaps in the political sphere. This study examines gender differences in decision certainty across the 2000 general election campaign. Results suggest that during the 2000 general election campaign, women were more likely to say that they did not know for whom they intended to vote when asked about their voting intentions. Once their intentions were declared, they were no less likely tha…
Issue Knowledge and Perceptions of Agreement in the 2004 Presidential General Election
Using post‐election data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study finds that compared to the 2000 election, candidate issue knowledge was relatively high by the end of the 2004 general election. It argues that just as in 2000, voters’ mistakes in matching presidential candidates with their issue positions benefited Republican incumbent George W. Bush more than Democratic challenger John Kerry. Perceived agreement with Bush exc…
To I-Vote or Not to I-Vote
The prospect of Internet voting has received much attention because of concerns over the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Proponents of Internet voting contend that the Internet will play an important role in revitalizing the American electorate. Opponents counter that Internet voting will benefit already advantaged groups. Using data collected in Arizona during the 2000 general election campaign, this study examined the opinions of regist…
Women and Political Knowledge During the 2000 Primaries
Prior research on political knowledge has found repeatedly that women do not perform as well as men on political affairs questions. The present study analyzed survey responses collected between 14 December 1999 and 8 March 2000 on political knowledge items about the issue positions and backgrounds of candidates Bradley, Gore, and McCain. Even when several sociodemographic variables were controlled for, gender was a significant predictor of politi…
Dynamics of the 2000 Republican Primaries
The 2000 presidential primaries were among the liveliest in recent memory. This article is the authors' first account of the changing fortunes of the candidates from the Iowa caucuses through Super Tuesday. It is based upon the nomination phase of the Annenberg 2000 Election Surveys, a collection of nearly 32,000 interviews conducted from November through March, nationwide and in special-purpose state and regional studies, on a broad range of pol…
The Voter News Service and the 2000 Election Night Calls
After examining the rhetoric of the network broadcast coverage on election night 2000, it is concluded that although individual "decision desk" call times were not identical across networks, there was a consistent pattern of correct and incorrect calls. The language of the election night broadcasts undercut network credibility on two counts. First, the networks largely failed to acknowledge their common reliance on the Voter News Service for thei…
Of What Is That Glass Ceiling Made
Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study examines the predictors of reporting that a woman or man would do a better job as president considering the national issue most important to the respondent. Gender, education, and ideology are strong predictors of presidential gender preference. Naming health care as the most important problem facing the nation is positively associated with believing a female president would …
Of what is that glass ceiling made
To I-Vote or Not to I-Vote
The prospect of Internet voting has received much attention because of concerns over the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Proponents of Internet voting contend that the Internet will play an important role in revitalizing the American electorate. Opponents counter that Internet voting will benefit already advantaged groups. Using data collected in Arizona during the 2000 general election campaign, this study examined the opinions of regist…
Detecting the Effects of Deceptive Presidential Advertisements in the Spring of 2004
Long before the political conventions of 2004, the Kerry and Bush campaigns and their surrogates were laying the groundwork for the fall campaign with heavy ad buys. Some of the assertions made on each side were misleading. Here we explore three misleading claims made on each side in the weeks following the effective end of the 2004 primary season and ask, Did they work? If so, with whom? Results from the National Annenberg Election Survey show t…
Who Watches Presidential Debates? A Comparative Analysis of Presidential Debate Viewing in 2000 and 2004
Presidential debates are a main feature of present-day presidential campaigns. For voters, they are a source of political learning about candidate issue positions. Fluctuations in the level of debate viewership from election to election and, within an election, from debate to debate invite the following questions: What is the composition of debate audiences? In what ways did the audiences in 2004 differ from 2000? In what ways did the audiences c…
Connections Between Internet Use and Political Efficacy, Knowledge, and Participation
Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study looks at the relationships between Internet access and online exposure to information about the presidential campaign and political efficacy, knowledge, and participation. Results show that Internet access and online exposure to information about the presidential campaign are significantly associated with these important political variables. Several of the associations betwee…
America's Youth and Community Engagement
This research examines the role of the mass media in young people's disengagement from politics. In a nationally representative telephone survey ( N = 1,501), young people (ages 14 to 22) reported their habits for 12 different uses of mass media as well as awareness of current national politics and time spent in civic activities. Following Putnam's hypothesis about the beneficial effects of civic ties on political involvement, the authors predict…
Issue Knowledge and Perceptions of Agreement in the 2004 Presidential General Election
Using post‐election data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study finds that compared to the 2000 election, candidate issue knowledge was relatively high by the end of the 2004 general election. It argues that just as in 2000, voters’ mistakes in matching presidential candidates with their issue positions benefited Republican incumbent George W. Bush more than Democratic challenger John Kerry. Perceived agreement with Bush exc…
Hispanic Voters in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential General Elections
In 2004, the vote margin between the major party presidential candidates was slim but wider than in 2000, leading scholars, pundits, and politicians to ask: among which demographic groups did George W. Bush specifically and the Republican party more generally make gains? Using data from the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES), we examine the extent to which Bush and the Republicans made gains among an increasingly important g…
Sexism Versus Partisanship
Issue Saliency and Gender Stereotypes
Objective. This article examines how issue saliency affects the public's perceptions of whether a man or a woman would make a better president when considering the most important problem facing the nation. Method. The study uses telephone survey data of adults in the United States collected by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in September 2003. Multinominial logistic regression models were conducted to parse out the effects of issue saliency on…
Gender and Time of Voting Decision
Scholars and the media have long been concerned about gender gaps in the political sphere. This study examines gender differences in decision certainty across the 2000 general election campaign. Results suggest that during the 2000 general election campaign, women were more likely to say that they did not know for whom they intended to vote when asked about their voting intentions. Once their intentions were declared, they were no less likely tha…
From Agenda Setting to Refusal Setting
Past research suggests that there is a relationship between survey response and topic salience, namely that individuals responding to a survey are likely to find the survey topic more salient than nonrespondents do. For election surveys, nonresponse resulting from a lack of salience can influence findings because respondents may be more interested in politics than nonrespondents. The agenda-setting model suggests that media coverage should height…
The Effects of Candidate Age in the 2008 Presidential Election
Using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), this study finds that during the general election, adults in the United States were more likely to report that John McCain, who was 71 during the 2008 primaries and 72 in the general election, was “too old to be president” than to report that Barack Obama was “too young to be president.” The percentage of the population subscribing to these views was not a constant in the general…
The Palin Effect and Vote Preference in the 2008 Presidential Election
Previous studies suggest that vice presidential candidates have little impact on the presidential vote. Using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), the author examines the extent to which the vice presidential selections from the two major parties had an impact on the presidential vote in 2008. The results show that vice presidential nominees' favorability ratings were significantly related to vote preference. In addition,…
Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates in 2008
In this study, the authors examine the composition of the audiences for the presidential and vice presidential debates in 2008. Results from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey show that the size of the vice presidential debate-viewing audience in 2008 exceeded the sizes of the presidential debate-viewing audiences, which is atypical from prior campaign seasons. The same general demographic and political characteristics that have driven p…
Twitter Use by Presidential Primary Candidates During the 2012 Campaign
This study examines Twitter use by presidential candidates during the 2012 primary election. The Twitter feeds and activity levels of candidates from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and Americans Elect parties and their campaigns were gathered over a 3-month span. Variables examined include the number of tweets posted, followers gained, and followers added as well as the occurrence of hashtags, user mentions, hyperlinks, and content cate…
Online News Consumption in the United States and Ideological Extremism
In an earlier study, the authors found evidence that supported a framework predicting that consumers of Internet news sources held more extreme political views and were interested in more diverse political issues than those who solely consume mainstream television news using data covering the period April 2000 to June 2007. In this essay, they test whether the same patterns hold using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey online p…
Candidate Traits and Political Choice
What role do presidential candidate character traits play in vote decisions? To some, the answer is obvious as campaigns, journalists, pundits, and voters frequently differentiate presidential candidates in terms of their personal qualities—traits are deemed important. On the other hand, past research suggests that, while candidate character traits are short term forces, they hold relatively limited in influence on vote preference. However, theor…
Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments
Incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from academic and popular commentators in recent years. In an effort to better understand the nature and determinants of such incivility, this study examined a 3-week census of articles and comments posted to a local newspaper's website—totaling more than 300 articles and 6,400 comments. The results of the content analysis show that incivility occurs frequently and is associated w…
Theories of Media Bias
Ideological or partisan media bias is widely debated despite disagreement about its meaning, measurement, and impact. The assumption that news should be objective is itself the object of considerable debate. Assertions of a conservative or establishment bias in the news often draw on critical theory, which argues that news preserves the hegemony of society’s ruling interests. Assertions of liberal bias draw on surveys of journalists’ attitudes an…
The Political Uses and Abuses of Civility and Incivility
After exploring the challenges involved in defining incivility, this chapter addresses the evolution of the concept, notes the dispute over trend lines, and précises work on its psychological effects. It then outlines some functions that civility and incivility serve, such as the functions of differentiating and mobilizing, marginalizing the powerless, expressing, and deliberating. The use of calls for civility as a means of social control is dis…
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