Fear and loathing across party lines now means that for some, partisan prejudice can be stronger than racial prejudice.

The evidence points to the American electorate being more polarized than ever – but aside from influencing election results, what does this mean for wider society? In new research Shanto Iyengar examines people’s prejudices towards those that identify with their political opponents – or ‘out groups’. By using experiments which test these prejudices, he finds that partisan prejudice and bias outweighs racial biases. He writes that this heightened state of partisan ill will may be being fuelled by the polarizing effects of a news media which allows people to self-select into an audience that shares their partisan views

Locus of Control and Anti‐Immigrant Sentiment in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136464/1/pops12338_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136464/2/pops12338.pd

Race, prejudice and attitudes toward redistribution: A comparative experimental approach

Past work suggests that support for welfare in the United States is heavily influenced by citizens’ racial attitudes. Indeed, the idea that many Americans think of welfare recipients as poor Blacks (and especially as poor Black women) has been a common explanation for Americans’ lukewarm support for redistribution. This article draws on a new online survey experiment conducted with national samples in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, designed to extend research on how racialised portrayals of policy beneficiaries affect attitudes toward redistribution. A series of innovative survey vignettes has been designed that experimentally manipulate the ethno‐racial background of beneficiaries for various redistributive programmes. The findings provide, for the first time, cross‐national, cross‐domain and cross‐ethno‐racial extensions of the American literature on the impact of racial cues on support for redistributive policy. The results also demonstrate that race clearly matters for policy support, although its impact varies by context and by the racial group under consideration.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134286/1/ejpr12158.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134286/2/ejpr12158_am.pd

Auntie knows best? public broadcasters and current affairs knowledge

Public service broadcasters (PSBs) are a central part of national news media landscapes. In many countries, PSBs are the first choice of citizens when it comes to news providers. And in perhaps more countries still, PSBs are thought of as specialists in provision of hard news. We test this proposition here using survey data from a large crossnational survey involving indicators of current affairs knowledge and media consumption. Specifically, we examine whether exposure to public versus commercial news influences the knowledge citizens possess about current affairs, both domestically and internationally. We also test, using propensity score analysis, whether there is variation across PSBs in this regard. Results indicate that compared to commercial news, watching PSB has a net positive influence on knowledge of hard news, though not all PSBs are equally effective in contributing to knowledge acquisition. This knowledge gap between PSB and commercial news media consumption appears to be mitigated by factors such as de jure independence,proportion of public financing, and audience share

Why context, relevance and repetition matter in news reporting: Interpreting the United Kingdom’s political information environment

This study develops a multi-method approach to analysing political information environments, exploring how media and political systems help shape people’s understanding of news. In doing so, we ask a question fundamental to democratic citizenship: how well do news media communicate political responsibility and policy differences across political systems? Our study examines the United Kingdom’s political information environment, where significant power is devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with different political parties in control. Drawing on a content analysis of 17,765 news items, a representative survey of 3272 respondents and 15 semi-structured interviews, we examine the dominant information sources about UK politics by longitudinally tracing coverage of devolved issues from 2007 to 2016, and gauging how well it was understood by television news viewers. Our results suggest that while BBC news is more sensitive to communicating the devolved relevance of news than more commercial outlets, there remains a democratic deficit in the supply of political information and audience understanding of where power and responsibility lies. If news coverage more regularly communicated the relevance and context of devolved issues, we argue it could open up democratic opportunities for citizens to consider a wider range of policy options debated in all four political institutions

The face of the party? Leadership personalisation in British campaigns

The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalisation of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalised messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3,300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalisation of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate – and their party – in the best possible light

Why are “others” so polarized? Perceived political polarization and media use in 10 countries.

This study tests the associations between news media use and perceived political polarization, conceptualized as citizens’ beliefs about partisan divides among major political parties. Relying on representative surveys in Canada, Colombia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Norway, United Kingdom and United States, we test whether perceived polarization is related to the use of television news, newspaper, radio news, and online news media. Data show that online news consumption is systematically and consistently related to perceived polarization, but not to attitude polarization, understood as individual attitude extremity. In contrast, the relationships between traditional media use and perceived and attitude polarization is mostly country dependent. An explanation of these findings based on exemplification is proposed and tested in an experimental design