Markus Prior
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628050 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Markus Prior |
| GIVEN NAMES | Markus |
| FAMILY NAME | Prior |
| SIGNATURE | PRIOR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1437-4751 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2108 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Are Voters Myopic or Looking for Improvement?
Timing of valence outcomes plays an important role in key theories of electoral choice, and different models place different emphases on past and future outcomes. Whereas sanctioning models consider only retrospective evaluations as an accountability mechanism, selection models hold that voters use past and proposed future conditions to infer the incumbent’s ability to deliver benefits. Drawing on four surveys run on six different samples, we dem…
Meaning Beyond Numbers: Introducing the Plot Staircase to Measure Graphical Preferences
People regularly get information about the political world in visual form, such as graphs of past economic growth, nonverbal cues from politicians, or projections of future climate change. Visual characteristics affect people’s preferences, but it is difficult to measure the extent of this effect precisely and concisely in surveys. We present a new adaptive design that measures the impact of visual characteristics on people’s preferences: The plo…
Hooked: How Politics Captures People's Interest
Like They’ve Never, Ever Seen in This Country”? Political Interest and Voter Engagement in 2016
Journalists and political pundits have characterized the 2016 presidential campaign as one featuring unusually high levels of political involvement among the mass public. This article subjects such claims to more systematic assessment, by comparing levels of political involvement in the 2016 presidential election campaign to those of previous election cycles. Through analyses of turnout statistics, survey questions by the Pew Research Center and …
Solutions to Political Polarization in America
Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from …
You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions
When surveyed about economic conditions, supporters of the president’s party often report more positive conditions than its opponents. Scholars have interpreted this finding to mean that partisans cannot even agree on matters of fact. We test an alternative interpretation: Partisans give partisan congenial answers even when they have, or could have inferred, information less flattering to the party they identify with. To test this hypothesis, we …
Visual Political Knowledge: A Different Road to Competence
Even though visual images and television are ubiquitous in politics, surveys rarely use visuals to assess what people know about politics. I measure visual political knowledge in a series of experiments that ask otherwise identical questions using either relevant visual elements or words only. These experiments were embedded in two representative surveys of U.S. residents conducted in 2003 and 2008. Adding a visual to an otherwise identical knowl…
The Challenge of Measuring Media Exposure: Reply to Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz
Political communication research has long been plagued by inaccurate self-reports of media exposure. Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013) Dilliplane, S., Goldman, S. and Mutz, D. 2013. Televised exposure to politics: New measures for a fragmented media environment. American Journal of Political Science, 57: 236–248. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] propose a new survey-based measure of "televised exposure to politics" that avoids…
Media and Political Polarization
This article examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates. Congress and some newer media outlets have added more partisan messages to a continuing supply of mostly centrist news. Although political attitudes of most Americans have remained fairly moderate, evidence points to some polarization among the politically involved. Proliferati…
You’ve Either Got It or You Don’t? The Stability of Political Interest over the Life Cycle
Some people are more politically interested than others, but political scientists do not know how stable these differences are and why they occur. This paper examines stability in political interest. Eleven different panel surveys taken in four different countries over 40 years are used to measure stability. Several studies include a much larger number of interview waves—up to 23—than commonly used panels. The analysis empirically characterizes t…
Improving Media Effects Research through Better Measurement of News Exposure
Survey research is necessary to understand media effects, but seriously impeded by considerable overreporting of news exposure, the extent of which differs across respondents. Consequently, apparent media effects may arise not because of differences in exposure, but because of differences in the accuracy of reporting exposure. Drawing on experiments embedded in two representative surveys, this study examines why many people overstate their exposu…
The Immensely Inflated News Audience: Assessing Bias in Self-Reported News Exposure
Many studies of media effects use self-reported news expo- sure as their key independent variable without establishing its validity. Motivated by anecdotal evidence that people's reports of their own me- dia use can differ considerably from independent assessments, this study examines systematically the accuracy of survey-based self-reports of news exposure. I compare survey estimates to Nielsen estimates, which do not rely on self-reports. Resul…
Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills
Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions corr…
Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections
The media environment is changing. Today in the United States, the average viewer can choose from hundreds of channels, including several twenty-four hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on iPods, and online; it has become a ubiquitous and unavoidable reality in modern society. The purpose of this 2007 book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and surv…
The Incumbent in the Living Room: The Rise of Television and the Incumbency Advantage in U.S. House Elections
This study shows that the growth of television contributed to the rise in the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections during the 1960s. Incumbents received positive coverage throughout their term and were generally more newsworthy and better funded than their challengers during the campaign. Less-educated voters, for whom television presented a new, less demanding source of news, were most affected by local television. Analysis of National E…
News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout
Despite dramatic increases in available political information through cable television and the Internet, political knowledge and turnout have not changed noticeably. To explain this seeming paradox, I argue that greater media choice makes it easier for people to find their preferred content. People who like news take advantage of abundant political information to become more knowledgeable and more likely to turn out. In contrast, people who prefe…
Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities
This paper examines the bases of opposition to immigrant minorities in Western Europe, focusing on The Netherlands. The specific aim of this study is to test the validity of predictions derived from two theories-realistic conflict, which emphasizes considerations of economic well-being, and social identity, which emphasizes considerations of identity based on group membership. The larger aim of this study is to investigate the interplay of predis…
Any Good News in Soft News? The Impact of Soft News Preference on Political Knowledge
Several scholars, most notably Matt Baum, have recently argued that soft news formats contribute to democratic discourse, because they attract viewers who would otherwise not be exposed to news at all. I extend Baum's approach in two ways. First, Baum's theory postulates that people's appreciation of entertainment is one of the factors determining news exposure and, by extension, attention to politics, but he does not analyze the underlying utili…
Political Knowledge after September 11
In this article, I examine how 9/11 and the subsequent efforts to combat terrorism have affected what people know about politics. My analysis suggests three main differences between knowledge before and after 9/11. First, knowledge of 9/11 and the “war on terrorism” shot up to uncommonly high levels, just as common sense and our theories would predict. The second point is less intuitive: Heightened interest spread to issues not directly related t…
Weighted Content Analysis of Political Advertisements
This article proposes weighted content analysis as a methodological extension of traditional (unweighted) content analysis of political advertising. Weighted content analysis distinguishes between political ads that were produced but not aired and ads that actually aired in a particular media market. To illustrate the advantages of weighted content analysis, this article examines the 1996 presidential campaign in Columbus, Ohio. The tone of 132 p…
The Theory of Democratic Elitism Revisited: A Response to Vengroffand Morton
Two questions have dominated the modern study of politics. How do political systems become democratic? And how, supposing they have managed to become democratic, do they manage to remain so? As yet, there is no agreement on the answer to the first question. For a generation, however, there has been consensus on a core part of the answer to the second. In democratic polities, political elites have come to consensus in support of democratic rights,…
Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities
This paper examines the bases of opposition to immigrant minorities in Western Europe, focusing on The Netherlands. The specific aim of this study is to test the validity of predictions derived from two theories-realistic conflict, which emphasizes considerations of economic well-being, and social identity, which emphasizes considerations of identity based on group membership. The larger aim of this study is to investigate the interplay of predis…
Media and Political Polarization
This article examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates. Congress and some newer media outlets have added more partisan messages to a continuing supply of mostly centrist news. Although political attitudes of most Americans have remained fairly moderate, evidence points to some polarization among the politically involved. Proliferati…
You’ve Either Got It or You Don’t? The Stability of Political Interest over the Life Cycle
Some people are more politically interested than others, but political scientists do not know how stable these differences are and why they occur. This paper examines stability in political interest. Eleven different panel surveys taken in four different countries over 40 years are used to measure stability. Several studies include a much larger number of interview waves—up to 23—than commonly used panels. The analysis empirically characterizes t…
The Immensely Inflated News Audience: Assessing Bias in Self-Reported News Exposure
Many studies of media effects use self-reported news expo- sure as their key independent variable without establishing its validity. Motivated by anecdotal evidence that people's reports of their own me- dia use can differ considerably from independent assessments, this study examines systematically the accuracy of survey-based self-reports of news exposure. I compare survey estimates to Nielsen estimates, which do not rely on self-reports. Resul…
Improving Media Effects Research through Better Measurement of News Exposure
Survey research is necessary to understand media effects, but seriously impeded by considerable overreporting of news exposure, the extent of which differs across respondents. Consequently, apparent media effects may arise not because of differences in exposure, but because of differences in the accuracy of reporting exposure. Drawing on experiments embedded in two representative surveys, this study examines why many people overstate their exposu…
Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills
Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions corr…
Any Good News in Soft News? The Impact of Soft News Preference on Political Knowledge
Several scholars, most notably Matt Baum, have recently argued that soft news formats contribute to democratic discourse, because they attract viewers who would otherwise not be exposed to news at all. I extend Baum's approach in two ways. First, Baum's theory postulates that people's appreciation of entertainment is one of the factors determining news exposure and, by extension, attention to politics, but he does not analyze the underlying utili…
You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions
When surveyed about economic conditions, supporters of the president’s party often report more positive conditions than its opponents. Scholars have interpreted this finding to mean that partisans cannot even agree on matters of fact. We test an alternative interpretation: Partisans give partisan congenial answers even when they have, or could have inferred, information less flattering to the party they identify with. To test this hypothesis, we …
The Incumbent in the Living Room: The Rise of Television and the Incumbency Advantage in U.S. House Elections
This study shows that the growth of television contributed to the rise in the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections during the 1960s. Incumbents received positive coverage throughout their term and were generally more newsworthy and better funded than their challengers during the campaign. Less-educated voters, for whom television presented a new, less demanding source of news, were most affected by local television. Analysis of National E…
Visual Political Knowledge: A Different Road to Competence
Even though visual images and television are ubiquitous in politics, surveys rarely use visuals to assess what people know about politics. I measure visual political knowledge in a series of experiments that ask otherwise identical questions using either relevant visual elements or words only. These experiments were embedded in two representative surveys of U.S. residents conducted in 2003 and 2008. Adding a visual to an otherwise identical knowl…
The Challenge of Measuring Media Exposure: Reply to Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz
Political communication research has long been plagued by inaccurate self-reports of media exposure. Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013) Dilliplane, S., Goldman, S. and Mutz, D. 2013. Televised exposure to politics: New measures for a fragmented media environment. American Journal of Political Science, 57: 236–248. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] propose a new survey-based measure of "televised exposure to politics" that avoids…
Weighted Content Analysis of Political Advertisements
This article proposes weighted content analysis as a methodological extension of traditional (unweighted) content analysis of political advertising. Weighted content analysis distinguishes between political ads that were produced but not aired and ads that actually aired in a particular media market. To illustrate the advantages of weighted content analysis, this article examines the 1996 presidential campaign in Columbus, Ohio. The tone of 132 p…
Like They’ve Never, Ever Seen in This Country”? Political Interest and Voter Engagement in 2016
Journalists and political pundits have characterized the 2016 presidential campaign as one featuring unusually high levels of political involvement among the mass public. This article subjects such claims to more systematic assessment, by comparing levels of political involvement in the 2016 presidential election campaign to those of previous election cycles. Through analyses of turnout statistics, survey questions by the Pew Research Center and …
Political Knowledge after September 11
In this article, I examine how 9/11 and the subsequent efforts to combat terrorism have affected what people know about politics. My analysis suggests three main differences between knowledge before and after 9/11. First, knowledge of 9/11 and the “war on terrorism” shot up to uncommonly high levels, just as common sense and our theories would predict. The second point is less intuitive: Heightened interest spread to issues not directly related t…
News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout
Despite dramatic increases in available political information through cable television and the Internet, political knowledge and turnout have not changed noticeably. To explain this seeming paradox, I argue that greater media choice makes it easier for people to find their preferred content. People who like news take advantage of abundant political information to become more knowledgeable and more likely to turn out. In contrast, people who prefe…
The Theory of Democratic Elitism Revisited: A Response to Vengroffand Morton
Two questions have dominated the modern study of politics. How do political systems become democratic? And how, supposing they have managed to become democratic, do they manage to remain so? As yet, there is no agreement on the answer to the first question. For a generation, however, there has been consensus on a core part of the answer to the second. In democratic polities, political elites have come to consensus in support of democratic rights,…
The Theory of Democratic Elitism Revisited: A Response to Vengroffand Morton
Two questions have dominated the modern study of politics. How do political systems become democratic? And how, supposing they have managed to become democratic, do they manage to remain so? As yet, there is no agreement on the answer to the first question. For a generation, however, there has been consensus on a core part of the answer to the second. In democratic polities, political elites have come to consensus in support of democratic rights,…
Weighted Content Analysis of Political Advertisements
This article proposes weighted content analysis as a methodological extension of traditional (unweighted) content analysis of political advertising. Weighted content analysis distinguishes between political ads that were produced but not aired and ads that actually aired in a particular media market. To illustrate the advantages of weighted content analysis, this article examines the 1996 presidential campaign in Columbus, Ohio. The tone of 132 p…
Political Knowledge after September 11
In this article, I examine how 9/11 and the subsequent efforts to combat terrorism have affected what people know about politics. My analysis suggests three main differences between knowledge before and after 9/11. First, knowledge of 9/11 and the “war on terrorism” shot up to uncommonly high levels, just as common sense and our theories would predict. The second point is less intuitive: Heightened interest spread to issues not directly related t…
Any Good News in Soft News? The Impact of Soft News Preference on Political Knowledge
Several scholars, most notably Matt Baum, have recently argued that soft news formats contribute to democratic discourse, because they attract viewers who would otherwise not be exposed to news at all. I extend Baum's approach in two ways. First, Baum's theory postulates that people's appreciation of entertainment is one of the factors determining news exposure and, by extension, attention to politics, but he does not analyze the underlying utili…
Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities
This paper examines the bases of opposition to immigrant minorities in Western Europe, focusing on The Netherlands. The specific aim of this study is to test the validity of predictions derived from two theories-realistic conflict, which emphasizes considerations of economic well-being, and social identity, which emphasizes considerations of identity based on group membership. The larger aim of this study is to investigate the interplay of predis…
News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout
Despite dramatic increases in available political information through cable television and the Internet, political knowledge and turnout have not changed noticeably. To explain this seeming paradox, I argue that greater media choice makes it easier for people to find their preferred content. People who like news take advantage of abundant political information to become more knowledgeable and more likely to turn out. In contrast, people who prefe…
The Incumbent in the Living Room: The Rise of Television and the Incumbency Advantage in U.S. House Elections
This study shows that the growth of television contributed to the rise in the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections during the 1960s. Incumbents received positive coverage throughout their term and were generally more newsworthy and better funded than their challengers during the campaign. Less-educated voters, for whom television presented a new, less demanding source of news, were most affected by local television. Analysis of National E…
Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections
The media environment is changing. Today in the United States, the average viewer can choose from hundreds of channels, including several twenty-four hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on iPods, and online; it has become a ubiquitous and unavoidable reality in modern society. The purpose of this 2007 book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and surv…
Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills
Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions corr…
Improving Media Effects Research through Better Measurement of News Exposure
Survey research is necessary to understand media effects, but seriously impeded by considerable overreporting of news exposure, the extent of which differs across respondents. Consequently, apparent media effects may arise not because of differences in exposure, but because of differences in the accuracy of reporting exposure. Drawing on experiments embedded in two representative surveys, this study examines why many people overstate their exposu…
The Immensely Inflated News Audience: Assessing Bias in Self-Reported News Exposure
Many studies of media effects use self-reported news expo- sure as their key independent variable without establishing its validity. Motivated by anecdotal evidence that people's reports of their own me- dia use can differ considerably from independent assessments, this study examines systematically the accuracy of survey-based self-reports of news exposure. I compare survey estimates to Nielsen estimates, which do not rely on self-reports. Resul…
You’ve Either Got It or You Don’t? The Stability of Political Interest over the Life Cycle
Some people are more politically interested than others, but political scientists do not know how stable these differences are and why they occur. This paper examines stability in political interest. Eleven different panel surveys taken in four different countries over 40 years are used to measure stability. Several studies include a much larger number of interview waves—up to 23—than commonly used panels. The analysis empirically characterizes t…
The Challenge of Measuring Media Exposure: Reply to Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz
Political communication research has long been plagued by inaccurate self-reports of media exposure. Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013) Dilliplane, S., Goldman, S. and Mutz, D. 2013. Televised exposure to politics: New measures for a fragmented media environment. American Journal of Political Science, 57: 236–248. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] propose a new survey-based measure of "televised exposure to politics" that avoids…
Media and Political Polarization
This article examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates. Congress and some newer media outlets have added more partisan messages to a continuing supply of mostly centrist news. Although political attitudes of most Americans have remained fairly moderate, evidence points to some polarization among the politically involved. Proliferati…
Visual Political Knowledge: A Different Road to Competence
Even though visual images and television are ubiquitous in politics, surveys rarely use visuals to assess what people know about politics. I measure visual political knowledge in a series of experiments that ask otherwise identical questions using either relevant visual elements or words only. These experiments were embedded in two representative surveys of U.S. residents conducted in 2003 and 2008. Adding a visual to an otherwise identical knowl…
Solutions to Political Polarization in America
Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from …
You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions
When surveyed about economic conditions, supporters of the president’s party often report more positive conditions than its opponents. Scholars have interpreted this finding to mean that partisans cannot even agree on matters of fact. We test an alternative interpretation: Partisans give partisan congenial answers even when they have, or could have inferred, information less flattering to the party they identify with. To test this hypothesis, we …
Hooked: How Politics Captures People's Interest
Like They’ve Never, Ever Seen in This Country”? Political Interest and Voter Engagement in 2016
Journalists and political pundits have characterized the 2016 presidential campaign as one featuring unusually high levels of political involvement among the mass public. This article subjects such claims to more systematic assessment, by comparing levels of political involvement in the 2016 presidential election campaign to those of previous election cycles. Through analyses of turnout statistics, survey questions by the Pew Research Center and …
Meaning Beyond Numbers: Introducing the Plot Staircase to Measure Graphical Preferences
People regularly get information about the political world in visual form, such as graphs of past economic growth, nonverbal cues from politicians, or projections of future climate change. Visual characteristics affect people’s preferences, but it is difficult to measure the extent of this effect precisely and concisely in surveys. We present a new adaptive design that measures the impact of visual characteristics on people’s preferences: The plo…
Are Voters Myopic or Looking for Improvement?
Timing of valence outcomes plays an important role in key theories of electoral choice, and different models place different emphases on past and future outcomes. Whereas sanctioning models consider only retrospective evaluations as an accountability mechanism, selection models hold that voters use past and proposed future conditions to infer the incumbent’s ability to deliver benefits. Drawing on four surveys run on six different samples, we dem…
Political science (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Social Media and Politics (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Advertising (7 works)