Bengt Johansson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4378028 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bengt Johansson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bengt |
| FAMILY NAME | Johansson |
| SIGNATURE | JOHANSSON B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Gothenburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8980-1677 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 206 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Multilevel government crisis communication on social media: A comparative and longitudinal approach
Agenda-setting is an important way for the government to capture public attention. Different government branches, with their specific target audiences, may have different agenda prioritization strategies. In the current study, we compared the agenda-setting process across seven countries and three levels of government branches during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employed a multilingual topic model to extract the agendas from social media data. Our r…
Media Salience Shifts and the Public’s Perceptions About Reality: How Fluctuations in News Media Attention Influence the Strength of Citizens’ Sociotropic Beliefs
This article examines whether shifts in news media attention to societal issues matter for how strong beliefs citizens have about those issues. Based on an issue signal approach, in which media salience is conceptualized as signal strength, the study analyzes whether sociotropic beliefs become more prevalent, extreme, and certain when news media salience rises, and less prevalent, extreme, and certain when media salience drops. Using a four-wave …
The Dynamics of Information-Seeking Repertoires: A Cross-Sectional Latent Class Analysis of Information-Seeking During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Understanding audiences' information-seeking behaviors during a societal crisis it vital for effective crisis communication. Prior research has identified how individuals combine information sources during a specific crisis phase. However, there is a lack of studies analyzing the stability of such behavior across phases. Therefore, this study utilizes a four-wave panel study conducted in Sweden (N = 13,718) to examine information-seeking repertoi…
Maintenance and Reformation of News Repertoires: A Latent Transition Analysis
Today’s media environment provides people ample opportunities for constructing news habits fitting their preferences, but our knowledge about the dynamics of such news habits is limited. Using a four-wave panel survey from Sweden and taking a news repertoires approach, the study identifies four groups of news users labeled Public service-oriented traditionalists, Minimalists, Engaged pluralists, and Quality-oriented explorers, which are each rela…
When the rally-around-the-flag effect disappears, or: When the Covid-19 pandemic becomes “normalized”
The rally-around-the-flag effect describes the tendency of public opinion to become more favourable toward political leaders in times of crises. Political leaders rarely can exchange this initial rally-around-effect into long-term support, however. The central question addressed in this paper is, why political leaders cannot maintain this increase in support over time. Based on three-wave panel data collected during the outbreak of the COVID-19 p…
Why Swedes Don’t Wear Face Masks During the Pandemic—A Consequence of Blindly Trusting the Government
Government trust is generally helpful for societies, especially in crisis situations, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, because governments rely on citizens to follow directives. Worldwide, with supporting evidence accumulating, a key directive has been to wear face masks. However, in Sweden, the government has questioned their usefulness. On other behavioral recommendations, such as handwashing, the government has taken a conventional path. …
Climate Change Frame Acceptance and Resistance: Extreme Weather, Consonant News, and Personal Media Orientations
Across the globe, extreme weather events have brought climate change into people’s daily lives. Extended heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires are now recurring in many regions across the globe. This study asks how the exceptional 2018 summer influenced climate change beliefs among Swedish citizens. More specifically, the study looks deeper into belief formation dynamics under intense, consonant, and extended news reporting–addressing one of the mos…
To Publish or Not to Publish? Assessing Journalism Ethics in News about a Terrorist Attack
This article compares how the Swedish public and journalists assessed the ethical aspects of harmful exposure and dissemination of unverified information in news reporting of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. The analysis derives from comparable web surveys with 1092 journalists and 3881 citizens who answered identical questions about the attack. Focus is placed on ethics as an expression of journalistic practice and the influence of situat…
No heat, no electricity, no water, oh no: An Idea model experiment in instructional risk communication
Instructional communication is a vital component of the risk communication process. Without adequate instruction, individuals are less likely to understand, value, and follow guidelines for protecting themselves and their loved ones. The IDEA model (internalization, distribution, explanation, and action), applied successfully in crisis communication, has shown promise for use in instructional risk communication, as well. More specifically, it may…
How the coronavirus crisis affects citizen trust in institutions and in unknown others: Evidence from ‘the Swedish experiment
We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web‐survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t0 and t1). The sample was self‐selected but diverse (a smaller subsa…
Did It Really Happen? How the Public Interprets Journalistic Disclaimers
Immediately following dramatic events, news reporting must be both fast and accurate. In an attempt to reconcile the inherent conflict between these two ambitions, journalists often use disclaimers, for example, “unconfirmed” or “reports of.” These disclaimers allow for the rapid publication of less than reliable content. The results from our survey experiment suggest that strong disclaimers, as intended, do lower the perceived reliability of sto…
Talk scandals
This chapter summarizes main arguments related to talk scandals, refer to some recent studies in which the concept has been applied, and discusses the implications of some fundamental transformations in mediated politics. It describes the concept of talk scandal to understand the role that talk, in its various forms, plays in the origin and development of political scandals. Talk scandals represent a new step in the mediatization of scandals. Tal…
Struggling for the Upper Hand: News sources and crisis communication in a digital media environment
Previous research shows how powerful interests outside the media have the upper hand in the relationship between journalists and sources. This conclusion is sometimes challenged by the fact that journalists might control framing, follow-ups, and the packaging of stories. This article seeks to contribute to the field of journalist–source studies by focusing on aspects of the digital media environment, with a focus on the breakthrough of online med…
Election Posters Around the Globe: Political Campaigning in the Public Space
Negotiating Politicians’ Responsibilities in News Interviews
News interviews are contexts in which political responsibilities are articulated and negotiated. Although the accountability interview is recognized as a commonsense practice in journalism, and the research on political interviews is substantial, it partly remains to explore how responsibilities are negotiated in different forms of questioning in journalism. This study investigates three generic forms of questioning: accountability questioning, t…
Through the Party Lens: How Citizens Evaluate TV Electoral Spots
Party affiliation is considered one of the most important factors explaining voters' party choice, but also a strong intervening variable when it comes to the effectiveness of electoral advertising. The question raised in this study is to what extent party affiliation explains voters' judgments of electoral advertising, which was investigated by using data carried out during the Swedish general election campaign 2010. The results show that party …
The Dynamics of Professional Identity: Why journalists view journalists working with PR as a threat to journalism
The aim of this article is to analyse how journalists' professional identity is related to their attitude towards PR. The focus is how—and to what extent—journalistic ideology, organizational belonging and the individual's social position influence journalists' perception that other journalists working with PR lower the trustworthiness of journalism. The analyses rest on data from the Swedish Journalist Survey 2011, which is a national representa…
The Mediatization of Political Accountability: Politics, the news media logic and industrial crises in the 1980s and 2000s
This study investigates how political accountability, as a key democratic principle, is performed in the media and how the practices and representations of accountability are transformed over time by the influences of mediatization. The implications of mediatization are analyzed with a focus on how aspects of media dramaturgy and independent journalism influence news reporting of political responsibility and how politicians are held to account in…
Siting conflicts between wind power and military aviation—Problems and potential solutions
Policy failure or moral scandal? Political accountability, journalism and new public management
Political accountability is fundamental in a democratic society. Societal changes such as the marketization of the public sector have, however, made accountability issues complex and negotiable. The question of who is to be held to account for policy failures is increasingly a subject of struggle within the media. The aim of this article is to examine how journalism does “accountability work” in a political setting marked by new public management…
Biased Interrogations: A multi-methodological approach on bias in election campaign interviews
This study, based on Swedish data from three elections (2002, 2006 and 2010) and on a revised version of Clayman's and Heritage's conceptualization of aggressive questioning, examines bias in election campaign interviews with leading political figures. In the first part of the study, the prevalence of partisan bias is explored, and this analysis confirms that such bias does not exist. Informed by Conversation Analysis, a limited number of intervi…
Governing the transition to low-carbon futures: A critical survey of energy scenarios for 2050
Journalism, News Sources and Public Relations
The manufacture of news, unlike other forms of production, relies on inputs from individuals and organisations located outside the formal news organisation in which production takes place (Franklin 1997, pp. 19-21). They are not paid in the usual sense of that word for their contribution and they are not subject to managerial authority. And yet they are vital to the news production process. Their cooperation and participation in the processes of …
Talk scandals
Journalism and Local Politics: A study of scrutiny and accountability in Swedish journalism
Political accountability is defined as an important aspect of scrutiny. By analysing newspapers at three different points in time (1961, 1981 and 2001), this study suggests that the kind of scrutiny often mentioned in the literature, characterised by thorough investigations and disclosures of political wrongdoings, barely exists in the local press. By identifying other forms of scrutiny more closely related to ordinary news reporting, the study s…
How the coronavirus crisis affects citizen trust in institutions and in unknown others: Evidence from ‘the Swedish experiment
We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web‐survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t0 and t1). The sample was self‐selected but diverse (a smaller subsa…
Governing the transition to low-carbon futures: A critical survey of energy scenarios for 2050
The Dynamics of Professional Identity: Why journalists view journalists working with PR as a threat to journalism
The aim of this article is to analyse how journalists' professional identity is related to their attitude towards PR. The focus is how—and to what extent—journalistic ideology, organizational belonging and the individual's social position influence journalists' perception that other journalists working with PR lower the trustworthiness of journalism. The analyses rest on data from the Swedish Journalist Survey 2011, which is a national representa…
The Mediatization of Political Accountability: Politics, the news media logic and industrial crises in the 1980s and 2000s
This study investigates how political accountability, as a key democratic principle, is performed in the media and how the practices and representations of accountability are transformed over time by the influences of mediatization. The implications of mediatization are analyzed with a focus on how aspects of media dramaturgy and independent journalism influence news reporting of political responsibility and how politicians are held to account in…
Journalism and Local Politics: A study of scrutiny and accountability in Swedish journalism
Political accountability is defined as an important aspect of scrutiny. By analysing newspapers at three different points in time (1961, 1981 and 2001), this study suggests that the kind of scrutiny often mentioned in the literature, characterised by thorough investigations and disclosures of political wrongdoings, barely exists in the local press. By identifying other forms of scrutiny more closely related to ordinary news reporting, the study s…
Biased Interrogations: A multi-methodological approach on bias in election campaign interviews
This study, based on Swedish data from three elections (2002, 2006 and 2010) and on a revised version of Clayman's and Heritage's conceptualization of aggressive questioning, examines bias in election campaign interviews with leading political figures. In the first part of the study, the prevalence of partisan bias is explored, and this analysis confirms that such bias does not exist. Informed by Conversation Analysis, a limited number of intervi…
Climate Change Frame Acceptance and Resistance: Extreme Weather, Consonant News, and Personal Media Orientations
Across the globe, extreme weather events have brought climate change into people’s daily lives. Extended heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires are now recurring in many regions across the globe. This study asks how the exceptional 2018 summer influenced climate change beliefs among Swedish citizens. More specifically, the study looks deeper into belief formation dynamics under intense, consonant, and extended news reporting–addressing one of the mos…
Election Posters Around the Globe: Political Campaigning in the Public Space
Policy failure or moral scandal? Political accountability, journalism and new public management
Political accountability is fundamental in a democratic society. Societal changes such as the marketization of the public sector have, however, made accountability issues complex and negotiable. The question of who is to be held to account for policy failures is increasingly a subject of struggle within the media. The aim of this article is to examine how journalism does “accountability work” in a political setting marked by new public management…
Media Salience Shifts and the Public’s Perceptions About Reality: How Fluctuations in News Media Attention Influence the Strength of Citizens’ Sociotropic Beliefs
This article examines whether shifts in news media attention to societal issues matter for how strong beliefs citizens have about those issues. Based on an issue signal approach, in which media salience is conceptualized as signal strength, the study analyzes whether sociotropic beliefs become more prevalent, extreme, and certain when news media salience rises, and less prevalent, extreme, and certain when media salience drops. Using a four-wave …
Negotiating Politicians’ Responsibilities in News Interviews
News interviews are contexts in which political responsibilities are articulated and negotiated. Although the accountability interview is recognized as a commonsense practice in journalism, and the research on political interviews is substantial, it partly remains to explore how responsibilities are negotiated in different forms of questioning in journalism. This study investigates three generic forms of questioning: accountability questioning, t…
Siting conflicts between wind power and military aviation—Problems and potential solutions
No heat, no electricity, no water, oh no: An Idea model experiment in instructional risk communication
Instructional communication is a vital component of the risk communication process. Without adequate instruction, individuals are less likely to understand, value, and follow guidelines for protecting themselves and their loved ones. The IDEA model (internalization, distribution, explanation, and action), applied successfully in crisis communication, has shown promise for use in instructional risk communication, as well. More specifically, it may…
The Dynamics of Information-Seeking Repertoires: A Cross-Sectional Latent Class Analysis of Information-Seeking During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Understanding audiences' information-seeking behaviors during a societal crisis it vital for effective crisis communication. Prior research has identified how individuals combine information sources during a specific crisis phase. However, there is a lack of studies analyzing the stability of such behavior across phases. Therefore, this study utilizes a four-wave panel study conducted in Sweden (N = 13,718) to examine information-seeking repertoi…
To Publish or Not to Publish? Assessing Journalism Ethics in News about a Terrorist Attack
This article compares how the Swedish public and journalists assessed the ethical aspects of harmful exposure and dissemination of unverified information in news reporting of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. The analysis derives from comparable web surveys with 1092 journalists and 3881 citizens who answered identical questions about the attack. Focus is placed on ethics as an expression of journalistic practice and the influence of situat…
Struggling for the Upper Hand: News sources and crisis communication in a digital media environment
Previous research shows how powerful interests outside the media have the upper hand in the relationship between journalists and sources. This conclusion is sometimes challenged by the fact that journalists might control framing, follow-ups, and the packaging of stories. This article seeks to contribute to the field of journalist–source studies by focusing on aspects of the digital media environment, with a focus on the breakthrough of online med…
Academic freedom at the University of Stockholm
Journalism and Local Politics: A study of scrutiny and accountability in Swedish journalism
Political accountability is defined as an important aspect of scrutiny. By analysing newspapers at three different points in time (1961, 1981 and 2001), this study suggests that the kind of scrutiny often mentioned in the literature, characterised by thorough investigations and disclosures of political wrongdoings, barely exists in the local press. By identifying other forms of scrutiny more closely related to ordinary news reporting, the study s…
Talk scandals
Journalism, News Sources and Public Relations
The manufacture of news, unlike other forms of production, relies on inputs from individuals and organisations located outside the formal news organisation in which production takes place (Franklin 1997, pp. 19-21). They are not paid in the usual sense of that word for their contribution and they are not subject to managerial authority. And yet they are vital to the news production process. Their cooperation and participation in the processes of …
Governing the transition to low-carbon futures: A critical survey of energy scenarios for 2050
Biased Interrogations: A multi-methodological approach on bias in election campaign interviews
This study, based on Swedish data from three elections (2002, 2006 and 2010) and on a revised version of Clayman's and Heritage's conceptualization of aggressive questioning, examines bias in election campaign interviews with leading political figures. In the first part of the study, the prevalence of partisan bias is explored, and this analysis confirms that such bias does not exist. Informed by Conversation Analysis, a limited number of intervi…
Siting conflicts between wind power and military aviation—Problems and potential solutions
Policy failure or moral scandal? Political accountability, journalism and new public management
Political accountability is fundamental in a democratic society. Societal changes such as the marketization of the public sector have, however, made accountability issues complex and negotiable. The question of who is to be held to account for policy failures is increasingly a subject of struggle within the media. The aim of this article is to examine how journalism does “accountability work” in a political setting marked by new public management…
Through the Party Lens: How Citizens Evaluate TV Electoral Spots
Party affiliation is considered one of the most important factors explaining voters' party choice, but also a strong intervening variable when it comes to the effectiveness of electoral advertising. The question raised in this study is to what extent party affiliation explains voters' judgments of electoral advertising, which was investigated by using data carried out during the Swedish general election campaign 2010. The results show that party …
The Dynamics of Professional Identity: Why journalists view journalists working with PR as a threat to journalism
The aim of this article is to analyse how journalists' professional identity is related to their attitude towards PR. The focus is how—and to what extent—journalistic ideology, organizational belonging and the individual's social position influence journalists' perception that other journalists working with PR lower the trustworthiness of journalism. The analyses rest on data from the Swedish Journalist Survey 2011, which is a national representa…
The Mediatization of Political Accountability: Politics, the news media logic and industrial crises in the 1980s and 2000s
This study investigates how political accountability, as a key democratic principle, is performed in the media and how the practices and representations of accountability are transformed over time by the influences of mediatization. The implications of mediatization are analyzed with a focus on how aspects of media dramaturgy and independent journalism influence news reporting of political responsibility and how politicians are held to account in…
Negotiating Politicians’ Responsibilities in News Interviews
News interviews are contexts in which political responsibilities are articulated and negotiated. Although the accountability interview is recognized as a commonsense practice in journalism, and the research on political interviews is substantial, it partly remains to explore how responsibilities are negotiated in different forms of questioning in journalism. This study investigates three generic forms of questioning: accountability questioning, t…
Struggling for the Upper Hand: News sources and crisis communication in a digital media environment
Previous research shows how powerful interests outside the media have the upper hand in the relationship between journalists and sources. This conclusion is sometimes challenged by the fact that journalists might control framing, follow-ups, and the packaging of stories. This article seeks to contribute to the field of journalist–source studies by focusing on aspects of the digital media environment, with a focus on the breakthrough of online med…
Election Posters Around the Globe: Political Campaigning in the Public Space
Talk scandals
This chapter summarizes main arguments related to talk scandals, refer to some recent studies in which the concept has been applied, and discusses the implications of some fundamental transformations in mediated politics. It describes the concept of talk scandal to understand the role that talk, in its various forms, plays in the origin and development of political scandals. Talk scandals represent a new step in the mediatization of scandals. Tal…
Did It Really Happen? How the Public Interprets Journalistic Disclaimers
Immediately following dramatic events, news reporting must be both fast and accurate. In an attempt to reconcile the inherent conflict between these two ambitions, journalists often use disclaimers, for example, “unconfirmed” or “reports of.” These disclaimers allow for the rapid publication of less than reliable content. The results from our survey experiment suggest that strong disclaimers, as intended, do lower the perceived reliability of sto…
When the rally-around-the-flag effect disappears, or: When the Covid-19 pandemic becomes “normalized”
The rally-around-the-flag effect describes the tendency of public opinion to become more favourable toward political leaders in times of crises. Political leaders rarely can exchange this initial rally-around-effect into long-term support, however. The central question addressed in this paper is, why political leaders cannot maintain this increase in support over time. Based on three-wave panel data collected during the outbreak of the COVID-19 p…
Why Swedes Don’t Wear Face Masks During the Pandemic—A Consequence of Blindly Trusting the Government
Government trust is generally helpful for societies, especially in crisis situations, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, because governments rely on citizens to follow directives. Worldwide, with supporting evidence accumulating, a key directive has been to wear face masks. However, in Sweden, the government has questioned their usefulness. On other behavioral recommendations, such as handwashing, the government has taken a conventional path. …
Climate Change Frame Acceptance and Resistance: Extreme Weather, Consonant News, and Personal Media Orientations
Across the globe, extreme weather events have brought climate change into people’s daily lives. Extended heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires are now recurring in many regions across the globe. This study asks how the exceptional 2018 summer influenced climate change beliefs among Swedish citizens. More specifically, the study looks deeper into belief formation dynamics under intense, consonant, and extended news reporting–addressing one of the mos…
To Publish or Not to Publish? Assessing Journalism Ethics in News about a Terrorist Attack
This article compares how the Swedish public and journalists assessed the ethical aspects of harmful exposure and dissemination of unverified information in news reporting of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. The analysis derives from comparable web surveys with 1092 journalists and 3881 citizens who answered identical questions about the attack. Focus is placed on ethics as an expression of journalistic practice and the influence of situat…
No heat, no electricity, no water, oh no: An Idea model experiment in instructional risk communication
Instructional communication is a vital component of the risk communication process. Without adequate instruction, individuals are less likely to understand, value, and follow guidelines for protecting themselves and their loved ones. The IDEA model (internalization, distribution, explanation, and action), applied successfully in crisis communication, has shown promise for use in instructional risk communication, as well. More specifically, it may…
How the coronavirus crisis affects citizen trust in institutions and in unknown others: Evidence from ‘the Swedish experiment
We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web‐survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t0 and t1). The sample was self‐selected but diverse (a smaller subsa…
Maintenance and Reformation of News Repertoires: A Latent Transition Analysis
Today’s media environment provides people ample opportunities for constructing news habits fitting their preferences, but our knowledge about the dynamics of such news habits is limited. Using a four-wave panel survey from Sweden and taking a news repertoires approach, the study identifies four groups of news users labeled Public service-oriented traditionalists, Minimalists, Engaged pluralists, and Quality-oriented explorers, which are each rela…
The Dynamics of Information-Seeking Repertoires: A Cross-Sectional Latent Class Analysis of Information-Seeking During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Understanding audiences' information-seeking behaviors during a societal crisis it vital for effective crisis communication. Prior research has identified how individuals combine information sources during a specific crisis phase. However, there is a lack of studies analyzing the stability of such behavior across phases. Therefore, this study utilizes a four-wave panel study conducted in Sweden (N = 13,718) to examine information-seeking repertoi…
Media Salience Shifts and the Public’s Perceptions About Reality: How Fluctuations in News Media Attention Influence the Strength of Citizens’ Sociotropic Beliefs
This article examines whether shifts in news media attention to societal issues matter for how strong beliefs citizens have about those issues. Based on an issue signal approach, in which media salience is conceptualized as signal strength, the study analyzes whether sociotropic beliefs become more prevalent, extreme, and certain when news media salience rises, and less prevalent, extreme, and certain when media salience drops. Using a four-wave …
Political science (23 works) · Media Studies and Communication (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Public Relations and Crisis Communication (13 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Public relations (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Politics (10 works)