Polarisation

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Claire Wonjeong Jo, whose focus is on the effects of cross-cutting exposure – these are seen as including both a better-informed citizenry and greater attitude and affective polarisation, and/or no effects at all. Past research draws largely on survey data, and measure a range of attributes; but perhaps there is a way to observe the actual news use behaviours of participants that provides more direct empirical data.

This study compares such data for South Korea and the United States; it applies social judgment theory, expectation violation theory (which suggests that …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Antonis Kalogeropoulos, whose focus is on news avoidance practices in the context of recent elections in Greece and Brazil. Such News avoidance is often seen as negative for democracy, as it reduces users’ access to information; however, it may be consistent or occasional, with a focus on general news content, or selectively focussing only on specific news content or content types.

How different are these conceptualisation? What are their possible implications for democratic outcomes? In spite of the considerable differences between their political systems, both Greece and Brazil had two …

The next ICA 2024 conference session starts with Haodong Liu, whose interest is in reinforcing spirals of media selectivity. There are various approaches to media selection, and the reinforcing spirals model suggests that over time suggests that selective media use reinforces users’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

This may involve selective exposure (choosing attitude-consonant media content) as well as defensive avoidance (selectively filtering out attitude-challenging sources and information) – and these are not necessarily inherently connected as a zero-sum game. The present study applies this to the coverage of climate change, where conservative media that challenge the accepted science on climate …

The fourth speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ao Wu, presenting a moral spectrum analysis of the ‘carbon’ issue in the Global News Database. There is plenty of transnational communication about climate change-related issues, including the push for carbon neutrality, but the interests and positions of different countries vary widely, and exhibit complex value logics that might be analysed through moral foundation theory. This theory introduces five dimensions: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. For environmental issues, these might be integrated into three broader categories: pragmatism/idealism, responsibility/profit, innovation/conservation.

These might be analysed especially in constructive journalism content that …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sujin Choi, presenting a stochastic actor-oriented modelling of shared-issue networks and personal news curation behaviours. The focus here is especially on issue publics, which pay particular attention to specific issues; this reflects the attention economy. But how do such issue publics come to be?

Issue publics might come to be because individuals have similar underlying interests; because they are unaware of other issues; or because of a manual filtering process. Such processes will be affected by their attention to issues (the monadic level); their awareness of other issues (the dyadic …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Harry Yan, whose begins by noting the increase of animosity and affective polarisation against opposing parties in the United States. What role do mass media play in this context? We already know that greater Internet use in itself is not to blame here: this has been shown by a range of studies already. More complex explanations need to be found.

The present study is interested in understanding active and interactive audiences through agent-based modelling – in doing so, this also moves beyond assumptions of passive mass media audiences in past …

The final paper in this ICA 2024 conference session is by Talia Stroud, who begins by noting that cross-cutting exposure is seen as normatively good – but exposure to cross-cutting views has also been found to potentially increase polarisation. Where such cross-cutting exposure takes place matters, then; cross-cutting exposure in inherently non-political spaces might be more productive here than it is in explicitly political spaces.

This links to intergroup contact theory (and, I assume, Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the third place), but in deeply bipolar nations such as the United States even the establishment of such non-political spaces might …

The next presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Biying Wu-Ouyang, presenting a systematic review of research on cross-cutting exposure. Social media users are constantly exposed to cross-cutting views, and this can increase information exposure and thus depolarise opinions, but also increase polarisation by confronting them with out-group perspectives; there may also be no effect whatsoever.

What exactly happens here depends on a range of factors – such as sources, modality, or intentions of the cross-cutting exposure. Other attributes (measurement, design and sampling strategies, and local contexts) may also affect the results of individual studies.

The present study is reviewing …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Emily Van Duyn, whose interest is in the negotiation of the personal and political in romantic relationships in the United States. While this has been studied so far especially for persisting relationships (and might therefore be affected by survivor bias), the present study focusses on relationships that ended, whether for political or other reasons.

Personal identity is our view of ourselves, and informed by our personal values and beliefs; we negotiate this as we enter into relationships of all kinds. Especially in the US, this also strongly includes political identity …

The next presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Heysung Lee, whose focus is on affective polarisation in multi-party systems. Affective polarisation has increasingly been recognised as an important factor, but has mainly been studied in bipolar political system like that of the United States, using tools like feeling thermometers; to assess it in multi-polar environments is more complicated. People might well have affective attachments to more than one party in such systems, and it may be necessary to find new methods to assess such attachments.

The present paper focusses on the experience in Colombia, and explores both the traditional …