Thinking about the media: a review of theory and research on media perceptions, media effects perceptions, and their consequences

This review explicates the past, present and future of theory and research concerning audience perceptions of the media as well as the effects that perceptions of media have on audiences. Before the sections that examine media perceptions and media effects perceptions, we first identify various psychological concepts and processes involved in generating media-related perceptions. In the first section, we analyze two types of media perceptions: media trust/credibility perceptions and bias perceptions, focusing on research on the Hostile Media Perception. In both cases, we address the potential consequences of these perceptions. In the second section, we assess theory and research on perceptions of media effects (often referred to as Presumed Influence) and their consequences (referred to as the Influence of Presumed Influence). As examples of Presumed Influence, we evaluate the literature on the Persuasive Press Inference and the Third-Person Perception. The bodies of research on media perceptions and media effects perceptions have been featured prominently in the top journals of the field of mass communication over the past 20 years. Here we bring them together in one synthetic theoretical review

Employees on social media: A multi-spokespeople model of CSR communication

Increasing societal and stakeholder expectations, along with easy access to information through social media, means corporations are asked for more information. The traditional approach to CSR communication, with corporations controlling what and how much to share with stakeholders has been restructured by social media, with stakeholders taking control. As legitimacy on social media is created through the positive and negative judgements of stakeholders, corporations must plan how to meet stakeholder demands for information effectively and legitimately, and this includes choosing appropriate spokespeople. Corporations in India have now turned towards their employees as CSR spokespeople. By encouraging employee activity on social media, these corporations are attempting to meet stakeholder demands and generate legitimacy through spokespeople whom stakeholders perceive as equals. This article examines that strategy and discusses its viability of using employees as spokespeople for CSR communication and engagement with stakeholder

The public understanding of climate change : A case study of Taiwanese youth

Global climate change is likely to be the most challenging environmental dilemma of the 21st century because its impacts on ecosystems and human society are transnational in scale and long term in scope. Due to its high scientific complexity and uncertainty and high political and economic sensitivity, mitigating the problem will require interdisciplinary cooperation and collective and sustained efforts on the part of all nations. Sufficient domestic support from both government and the lay public will not only be significant to the success of an international climate regime, but also crucial to the effectiveness of potential domestic climate policies. Such circumstances call for exploration of how the level of the public’s scientific understanding of climate change influences choices for climate protective actions and support for climate policies. Social scientists have the responsibility to explore how people perceive, understand, and respond to global climate change and to investigate the roles and interrelationships of various actors (e.g., scientists, citizens, and elected and appointed officials) in the policy-making process. Compared with numerous social scientific studies of global climate change in North America and Europe, substantially fewer investigations have focused on other regions of the world. Therefore, this doctoral research presents a case study of domestic climate policy formulation premised on the integration of science and citizens in an industrialized Asian society - Taiwan. This dissertation reports the views of Taiwanese youth with respect to global climate change based on data compiled from three empirical studies (i.e., integrated assessment focus groups, pre- and post-surveys, and a web-based survey). These studies in combination present three primary findings: 1) Most Taiwanese young adults tend to endorse pro-climate protection attitudes and behaviors; 2) These young adults display an extensive but limited scientific understanding pertaining to the problem; 3) A process of experimental participation with scientists enhanced individual scientific understanding and policy making. Further investigation revealed that these perceptions were grounded in a strong sense of ecological citizenship, which is likely influenced by the contemporary environmental movement in Taiwan since the 1980s. While this case study finds that scientific knowledge is less influential in determining individual behavioral intentions than public attitudes toward climate change, the continual enhancement of public ethical awareness about global climate change provides a helpful approach for policy makers seeking to obtain public support

The Political Campaign Industry and the Emergence of Social Media in Post-authoritarian Indonesian Electoral Politics

This dissertation analyses the emergence of social media for electoral campaigning in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Using a critical political economy perspective, it examines the interactions between social media, the political campaign industry, which is understood as a product of “the cross-development of political and commercial persuasion techniques in the 20th century” (Stockwell, 2000, p. 3), and electoral players. This thesis evaluates how the political campaign industry intersects with social media-enabled production and distribution of campaign messages (content), audience (users) mobilisation and labour organisation. It also assesses the impact of the political campaign industry’s social media work upon the web of relations between candidates, donors and voters during electoral periods. The findings confirm that social media has enabled the growing Indonesian political campaign industry to develop social media campaigning services that have been adopted widely in Indonesian elections. These findings contradict previous studies that have suggested that social media contribute to the nurturance of democracy in contemporary Indonesia by enabling citizens to discuss alternative issues to elite-generated ones carried by conventional media (Nuswantoro, 2014; Suaedy, 2014). By contrast, this dissertation demonstrates that during electoral campaign periods social media were not autonomous from heavy industry-driven engineering. Instead, social media enabled the political campaign industry to further encroach upon Indonesian electoral politics and thereby generate greater profits for the industry. These strategies were made possible because social media electoral campaigning serves not only as practical tool of persuasion but also a new mechanism to manage the temporary converging interests of political, economic and cultural forces during electoral campaign periods. Put differently, with the assistance of the political campaign industry, Indonesian political economy elites have been able to capture social media to safeguard their social ascendancy through competitive elections

Australian votes in the making: a critical review of voter behaviour research in Australia

Raphaella Kathryn Crosby conducted a critical review of the theory and method of voter behaviour research, with a focus on the 2019 Australian federal election. She found there was little agreement or consensus among the research, and no common narrative of the election. Using a Grounded Theory approach she identified five distinct battlegrounds of the 2019 election, and proposed two new theories to explain seemingly illogical voter behaviour

DIVIDED WE VOTE… TURNOUT DECLINE IN ESTABLISHED DEMOCRACIES: EVIDENCE FROM COSTA RICA

Turnout has decreased in 23 out of 36 established democracies since 1945. Among all worldwide cases Costa Rica is a good laboratory for studying turnout oscillations. During three decades between 1958 and 1994, political participation average rates remained high in a comparative perspective. Following that trend, one would easily predict that individuals socialized during that period of time must replicate automatically their parents’ and grandparents’ levels of high political activism. However, turnout patterns in the country since 1998 do not fit very well in that story. Older voters are no longer voting at the rates they usually did and the younger are entering into politics during times of lower participation. The combination of these two factors can have big deleterious and long-lasting effects on turnout trends. Estimating the causal relationship between consecutive voting decisions has proven to be intrinsically difficult for social scientists. Drawing on an exceptionally rich and unique turnout dataset and a mixed-methods approach that includes longitudinal multivariate analysis, face-to-face interviews and geospatial statistics this contribution seeks to explain why in Costa Rica, currently the oldest and most stable democracy in Latin America, turnout has declined? And more importantly: what factors drive these changes? Individual characteristics, although still relevant in static theories regarding turnout determinants, have proved to be insufficient for understanding why individuals’ turnout behavior varies over time. Instead, I theorize that the partisan (group) identity that makes people turn out because they are loyal to the party in a context of conflict produces stronger motivation but it is activated selectively, and it only works in a context of “threat” or polarized deliberation. Nevertheless, these incentives may change over time, they may increase or decrease under certain circumstances impacting turnout. Essentially, the more polarized the electoral competition, the easier it will be for citizens to cast their vote. A polarized deliberation, the key factor in my causal story, creates the conditions for the activation of strong partisan identities that stimulate voters’ mobilization to the polls. Therefore, people vote more in a context of polarization. Conversely, if polarization declines, people will vote less

Entity/Event-Level Sentiment Detection And Inference

Sentiment analysis aims at recognizing and understanding opinions expressed in languages. Previous work in sentiment analysis focused on extracting explicit opinions, which are directly expressed via sentiment words. However, opinions may be expressed implicitly via inferences over explicit sentiments. For example, in the sentence It is great that he was promoted. versus It is great that he was fired, there is an explicitly positive sentiment in both sentences because of the positive sentiment word great. Previous work may stop here. However, the sentiment toward he in the former sentence is positive, while the sentiment toward he in the later sentence is negative. The sentiments toward he in both sentences are implicit since there is no sentiment word directly modifying he. The implicit opinions are indicated in the text, and they are important for a sentiment analysis system to fully understand the documents. While previous work cannot recognize such implicit sentiment, this thesis contributes to developing an entity/event-level sentiment analysis system to recognize both explicit and implicit sentiments expressed from entities toward entities and events. Specifically, we first give the definitions of the entity/event-level sentiment analysis task. Since this is a new task, we develop two corpora serving as resources for this task. The implicit sentiments cannot be recognized merely relying on sentiment lexicons since the implicit sentiments are not directly associated with sentiment words. Inference rules are needed to recognize the implicit sentiments. Instead of developing a rule-based system to automatically infer implicit opinions, we develop computational models which use the inference rules as soft constraints. What’s more important, the models take into account the information not only from sentiment analysis tasks, but also from other Natural Language Processing tasks including information extraction and semantic role labeling. The models jointly solve different NLP tasks in one single model and improve the performances of the tasks. We also contribute to improving recognizing sources of opinions in this thesis. Finally, we conduct an analysis study showing that the idea of sentiment inference defined in this thesis can be applied to Chinese text as well

HOUSEHOLD RECYCLING BEHAVIOUR: A BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVE

Environmental issues put short-term economic gratification in direct conflict with long-term survival of the planet: they are no longer considered ‘distant’. There is a causal link between the disposal and treatment of waste and global environmental problems. Recycling is one of the most effective remedies to the problem of waste. There is evidence of an intention-action gap in household recycling behavior. The psychological nature of the decision to recycle is the most likely explanation for this intention-action gap. The present dissertation combines behavioral economics and psychology of incentives. It studies the cognitive processes underlying the recycling intention-action gap and offers a theoretical framework to design effective nudges. The work consists of three sequential articles: the first two articles include a lab experiment, the third runs a computer simulation. Article 1 considers a semantic stimulus and tests the priming effect on recycling behavior of two stereotypes: the environmentalist and the conscientious citizen. Article 2 considers a contextual (conceptual plus visual) stimulus and tests the priming effect of two induced feelings: spirituality and nature. Article 3 develops an agent-based model to assess the effects of the major findings of Article 1 and 2 on the system as a whole

Exploring the Relationship between Tourism and Economic Growth in Small Island Economies: A Study of Fiji

This study examines the effect of tourism, measured by visitor arrivals) on the economic growth of Fiji, a small island economy, over the period 1975 to 2015. We use a neoclassical framework and regression analysis to examine the short-run and the long-run effects of tourism whilst accounting for structural breaks. We confirm the presence of a long-run association using the two-step procedure of Engle and Granger (1987) and the ARDL bounds test of Pesaran, Shin and Smith (2001). From the long-run results, we note that a 1% increase in visitor arrivals contribute about 0.22% to the GDP per capita. The short run elasticity is noted to be 0.19%. The study finds evidence of a unidirectional causality from economic growth to tourism, and mutually reinforcing effect between capital investment and tourism. Thus, we can expect greater impact of tourism on the economic growth through tourism related investment activities such as improvements in airports, roads, transportation, financial sector and telecommunications, and parks and beaches