Exploring the Optimum Level of Cross-Cutting Media Exposure

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with the great Helena Rauxloh. Her paper emerges from the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten, which builds on longitudinal Web tracking and survey data from some 4,000 participants in Germany. The key concept in this study is political efficacy, which is the feeling that political action has an impact on political processes. This divide into internal and external efficacy as experienced by individuals, and such efficacy mediates news exposure and political engagement. It is thus a precondition for political participation.

Another aspect to consider here is media pluralism: in principle, this fosters a well-informed citizenry and enables inclusive public discourse and public oversight of political actors; however, exposure to information may also overwhelm, and exposure to opposing viewpoints may also increase the individual’s adherence to existing and potentially polarised views.

There may therefore be an optimum level of diversity in news availability and consumption, located somewhere between a lack of diversity and an overwhelming level of diversity – and empirical work like POLTRACK can help us determine where this optimum point may be located.

The approach taken here is to examine the diversity of the news sources consumed by German news users participating in the project; these sources are coded for their coverage style and political positioning, and by taking into account these attributes it is possible to arrive at a more sophisticated analysis of diversity than by merely counting the number of outlets consumed without taking such attributes into account.