Why do we pay more attention to negative news than to positive news?

A growing body of evidence illustrates the human tendency to prioritise negative over positive news content. But why is this? Stuart Soroka suggests that humans may neurologically or physiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information because the potential costs of negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information

How President Trump helped the media lose the 2018 midterm elections

Historically, leading up to Election Day, media coverage tends to follow the polls: when one party is doing better with voters, the media’s tone tends to be more favorable towards them. But in a new analysis of news coverage of midterm elections since 2002, Stuart Soroka finds that the 2018 midterms were a different story. If the midterms had followed previous trends, he argues, then the media’s negative tone towards the Democrats would have pointed to as much as a four percent drop in the party’s vote share. He writes that this coverage, even in the face of the party’s much-anticipated midterm victories, may be a consequence of media attentiveness to President Trump’s negative rhetoric about his opposition

Harnessing the Power of Focal Points To Measure Social Agreement

This paper reports results from an application of Thomas Schelling’s (1960) concept of a focal point to the measure of social agreement on the received tone of media content. In our experiments, subjects rate the tone, positive, negative, or neutral, of newspaper articles and news broadcasts, with an incentive to coordinate responses. We compare the content analysis of a traditional subject pool with those of a representative cross-section of the general public. Our application of the coordination game with strategy labels illustrates that the concept of a focal point can be put to use as a measure of social agreement. Le document présente les résultats obtenus en appliquant le concept de point focal, avancé par Thomas Schelling (1960), à la mesure de l’accord social concernant la perception du ton qui se dégage du contenu médiatique. Dans le cadre des expériences mises sur pied, les sujets évaluent le ton, positif, négatif ou neutre, adopté dans des articles de journaux et des bulletins de nouvelles et sont encouragés, par des mesures incitatives, à coordonner leurs réponses. Nous comparons l’analyse du contenu réalisée par un bassin traditionnel de sujets à celle menée par un échantillon représentatif du grand public. Notre application du jeu de coordination faisant appel à des étiquettes de stratégies démontre que la notion de point focal peut être utilisée pour mesurer l’accord social.Coordination, focal point, experiment, content analysis, media, Coordination, point focal, expérience, analyse du contenu, médias

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

The media and public opinion react to changes in economic conditions, not the state of the economy in general.

Economic headlines have come to dominate media reports in our contemporary 24/7 news cycle. But how are economic changes reflected by the media? By comparing more than 30,000 news stories from the New York Times and The Washington Post with economic and consumer indicators, Stuart Soroka, Dominik Stecula, and Christopher Wlezien, find that the media and public opinion react to economic changes, rather than the overall state of the economy. They also find that media reports tend to reflect future economic expectations, rather than what is presently occurring, or has happened before.These findings have important implications for political leaders, in that they cannot simply rely on general economic indicators – they will be judged more on recent and future economic changes

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

Growing apart? Partisan sorting in Canada, 1992–2015

Recent decades have been marked by increasingly divided partisan opinion in the US. This study investigates whether a similar trend might be occurring in Canada. It does so by examining redistributive preferences, using Canadian Election Studies data from every election since 1992. Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sorting that is comparable to that in the US. Over time, like-minded citizens have increasingly clustered into parties, with increasingly stark divisions between partisans

It's (Change in) the (Future) Economy, Stupid: Economic Indicators, the Media, and Public Opinion

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111207/1/ajps12145-sup-0001-text.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111207/2/ajps12145.pd

Real-time analysis shows that the first debate shifted attitudes among Twitter users towards Biden and the second solidified them.

While debates tend to have a limited effect on a presidential election’s outcome, they can nonetheless play an important role in the way that the media frames the campaigns. In new research Lisa Singh, Ceren Budak, Kornraphop Kawintiranon and Stuart Soroka analysed real-time responses of Twitter uses to the first and second presidential debates. They found that the first debate moved users’ support more towards Joe Biden, and that the second debate maintained this support with little improvement for Donald Trump

Smartphone-size screens constrain cognitive access to video news stories

Smartphones are expanding physical access to news and political information by making access to the internet available to more people, at more times throughout the day, and in more locations than ever before. But how does the portability of smartphones – afforded by their small size – affect cognitive access to news? Specifically, how do smartphone-size screens constrain attentiveness and arousal? We investigate how mobile technology constrains cognitive engagement through a lab-experimental study of individuals’ psychophysiological responses to network news on screens the size of a typical laptop computer, versus a typical smartphone. We explore heart rate variability, skin conductance levels, and the connection between skin conductance and the tone of news content. Results suggest lower levels of cognitive access to video news content on a mobilesized screen, which has potentially important consequences for public attention to current affairs in an increasingly mobile media environment