Communicating Public Opinion in Post-Fact Politics: Biased Processing of Public Opinion Reports and Potential Journalistic Correctives

People rely on polls and other representations of public opinion in the media to update their political cognitions and behaviors. However, individuals’ preexisting beliefs can color how they perceive opinion reports, and lead them to cherry-pick evidence that is congenial when presented with multiple options. Such biases result in distorted perceptions of public opinion, declining trust in journalism, and political polarization. Moreover, in today’s unprecedentedly polarized and contentious information environment, individuals often encounter contradictory messages from digital data-journalism and numerical evidence is regularly critiqued, fact-checked, or debunked on reasonable or unreasonable grounds. In such a cacophonous context, individuals’ biases in information processing might amplify. Through three large national survey experiments and one smaller study, this dissertation examines how news consumers’ attributes, the content of opinion reports and patterns of media coverage can trigger or mitigate biases in public perceptions. In the first part, I document that individuals process reports of public opinion in biased ways - when they evaluate issue polls, election polls in competitive contexts, and diverse metrics of public opinion. I also show that their levels of knowledge and education moderate the extent of these biases. In the second part, I find that the corrective potential of three journalistic remedies to reduce these biases are minimal and contingent upon individuals’ education levels. I discuss implications for political polarization, trust in the press and representatives, and democratic politics at large.PHDCommunicationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143952/1/okuru_1.pd

Making noise : how Twitter is revolutionizing the art of communication

textThis paper seeks to understand how the micro-blogging tool, Twitter, can be used effectively by marketers and advertisers by incorporating the attributes of information quality, information usefulness and source credibility into their tweets. Case analyses of five of the most popular Twitter accounts were conducted with regards to the appearance of each account and the content of their tweets. Recommendations for improving the quality of each Twitter account were also provided.Advertisin

Polls, Coalition Signals, and Strategic Voting: An Experimental Investigation of Perceptions and Effects

The paper investigates how poll information and coalition signals affect strategic voting, defined as casting a vote for a party other than the most preferred party to better influence the election outcome. In particular if the outcome of an election is perceived to be close, voters in multi-party systems with proportional representation and coalition governments should have an incentive to cast a vote for the party that best influences the formation of the next government. The study focuses in particular on voters’ attention to and perception of polls and coalition signals sent by parties before elections. The study used an innovative design that embedded a laboratory experiment in two real election campaigns, allowing the manipulation of poll results and coalition signals in a realistic environment. The findings suggest that political sophistication plays a crucial role for the accurate perception of polls and strategic voting. Coalition signals are found to have a surprisingly strong effect on (apparently) strategic voting.

Bias in Hard News Articles from Fox News and MSNBC: An Empirical Assessment Using the Gramulator

Hard news articles can reflect a media organization\u27s bias. This study assesses bias in hard news articles published by Fox News and MSNBC. More specifically, the study examines bias in the two networks\u27 coverage of elections and immigration. Indicative linguistic features identified by the Gramulator reveal biases in corpora of texts pertaining to these two news topics. The results suggest that the networks exercise selection bias. Furthermore, the findings show that the networks use the same collocations differently and also use different collocations to refer to the same referents

Fighting Abuse while Promoting Free Speech: Policies to Reduce Opinion Manipulation in Online Platforms

With the rise of misinformation epidemic, this study aims to empirically investigate the consequences of an online commenting platform’s activity-capping policy on abusers’ and regular users’ activities. Utilizing a quasi-experimental setting, we find that restrictive policies not only curtail the activity of the abusers, but also promote the activity of regular users. Results show that the policy has asymmetric effect on abusers and regular users— while it effectively reduces the actions of the malicious users by 1.8%, it promotes the activities of the regular users by 2.2%. To better understand the behavioral change of the regular users, we draw from the rational economic perspective of voting decisions and provide initial evidence that such policy measures reinforce the subjective probability of being influential on the outcome. This study will provide valuable implications to managers and policy makers to estimate the consequences of and to combat against malicious behaviors in online platforms

Without Local Newspapers, Can We Save Our Democracy? An Analysis of Political Culture, Voter Turnout, and Civic Engagement

Since the 1830s, newspapers have been accessible to all members of the public in the United States regardless of socio-economic status. Newspapers are important political information providers. Local journalists provide invaluable expertise for the community they serve about community-level problems, local elections, and help hold government accountable. If news organizations cannot afford to sustain a local newspaper and its staff, the result is a news desert for the community. While recent research has examined the decline of local newspapers, little has been done on how the decline of local newspapers affects civic engagement and voter turnout across the United States. To what extent do local newspapers contribute to civic engagement? Using Daniel Elazar’s (1966) typology of a state’s political culture, this thesis hypothesizes that moralistic states have fewer news deserts, higher voter turnout, and higher civic engagement than individualistic and traditionalistic states. This thesis did not find a clear distinction of moralistic states being the highest in voter turnout, in civic engagement, and lower in news desert concentration, but it appears that moralistic states have higher voter turnout in the 2014 midterm election across the board and have news deserts growing at the slowest rate compared to the individualistic and traditionalistic typologies. The health of our democratic republic requires civic engagement, and people need access to quality information to participate and cast their ballots

Foreign Affairs and the 2008 Election

Much of the commentary in the wake of last month’s presidential election has focused on the magnitude and historic aspects of Barack Obama’s victory and the deteriorating economic environment in which it played out. Little thought has been given to the influence of foreign affairs in the election. Yet even in this year’s contest, which appears to lend considerable support to economic-based theories of elections, international events clearly played an important role by shaping the nomination process for both major parties and in Obama’s selection of Joseph Biden as his running mate

LEGITIMACY CRISIS IN BANGLADESH: A CASE STUDY OF 10th GENERAL ELECTION

Method of an election, the participation of voters and political parties to the election without barriers, conducting a free and fair election, credibility of election’s result, as well as legitimacy of the government, are one of the arguable issues in Bangladeshi politics. The 10th general election in Bangladesh was held on 05 January 2014 with the lack of all of the criteria of legitimacy. The ruling Bangladesh Awami League (BAL) government was accused to use all possible ways to prevent the opposition political parties from participating the election as a result Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led opposition political parties boycotted the national election in the issue of caretaker government (CTG) and the BAL came in power again without any competition. The majority of parliament members (MPs) were elected without any contest, voters’ turnout was about 22.66%, a lot of polling centers were empty, a large number of opposition party leaders and candidates were arrested, and many people died in the clash. Local and International experts, observers, and donor agencies expressed their dissatisfaction with the credibility of the election although the ruling party claimed the election was free and fair. The BAL government had faced a legitimacy crisis both at home and abroad. From 2014 to 2018 Bangladesh had missed all norms of democracy practically but formally it was a “democratic regime”! The main question of the research is how the 2014 national election made the BAL govt. illegitimate? For this study the data was collected from both primary and secondary sources what includes books, articles, newspapers, periodicals, statements of the political parties; statements of the various election observers’ organizations as well as Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) both national and international. The current paper has designed with three parts. The introductory part decorated with the conceptual framework and literature review. The second part tried to give a clear picture of the 2014 national election. This part explained how the 2014 national election made the BAL govt. illegitimate and why it was a step of one-party rule. The third part concluded with some findings.  Article visualizations

The relationship of (perceived) epistemic cognition to interaction with resources on the internet

Information seeking and processing are key literacy practices. However, they are activities that students, across a range of ages, struggle with. These information seeking processes can be viewed through the lens of epistemic cognition: beliefs regarding the source, justification, complexity, and certainty of knowledge. In the research reported in this article we build on established research in this area, which has typically used self-report psychometric and behavior data, and information seeking tasks involving closed-document sets. We take a novel approach in applying established self-report measures to a large-scale, naturalistic, study environment, pointing to the potential of analysis of dialogue, web-navigation – including sites visited – and other trace data, to support more traditional self-report mechanisms. Our analysis suggests that prior work demonstrating relationships between self-report indicators is not paralleled in investigation of the hypothesized relationships between self-report and trace-indicators. However, there are clear epistemic features of this trace data. The article thus demonstrates the potential of behavioral learning analytic data in understanding how epistemic cognition is brought to bear in rich information seeking and processing tasks