Awardee Interview: Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award (2023)

le-ri: Rune Slothuus, Rasmus Skytte, Martin Bisgaard

Award won:

  • Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award for “the best paper on political communication presented at the previous year’s APSA annual meeting or Political Communication pre-conference”.
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Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Rune Slothuus, Aarhus University
  • Rasmus Skytte, Aarhus University
  • Martin Bisgaard, Aarhus University
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Project title:

  • ”Party Cues Change How Citizens Understand Policy”
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Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

  • Interested readers can contact any of the authors to get the latest version of this research.
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Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • One of the most influential types of political communication are “party cues,” signals about which political party endorses or opposes a public policy. Many studies show that party cues move citizens’ policy opinions. But we wondered if party cues also convey substantive policy information that citizens can use to make sense of the policy itself.
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In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • We find that citizens do use party cues to make sense of policy substance. This occurs because citizens draw on their knowledge about parties’ policy reputations: what the party generally stands for and whom it represents. Depending on the policy reputation of the party sponsor, citizens make distinct inferences about what a policy entails.
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What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • Cues and endorsements are ubiquitous in political news and debates. To anyone who cares about how political communication shapes – and possibly encourages – citizens’ reasoning about policy substance, it is important to know that party cues not only evoke partisan sentiments or mobilize citizens to express allegience to their party’s policies. Rather, party cues also work as a rich information source citizens can use to make sense of policy issues.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again?

  • We are intrigued by the open-ended responses in our surveys. They are a promising way to study how citizens reason about the political communications they receive. And new text-as-data methods offer new opportunities to analyze such responses. It is challenging, though, in to get respondents to write about their thoughts online surveys. In subsequent work, we will try different ways to better gauge citizens reasoning with open-ended responses.
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What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • We would like to see more attempts to bridge levels of analysis to understand how citizens’ political behavior interacts with the structure of political institutions and information environments.
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What’s next?

  • This paper is part of a larger project (funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant to Rune Slothuus) where we study how citizens use political parties to reason about politics. In this project, we work with other colleagues, including Love Christensen, Nic Dias and Davide Morisi, to test how citizens’ policy inferences affect their opinion formation and how citizens respond to more complex information environments, such as when multiple and competing cues are present.
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Awardee Interview: Doris A. Graber Outstanding Book Award (2023)

Daniel J. Hopkins

Award won:

  • APSA Doris A. Graber Outstanding Book Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Daniel J. Hopkins

 

Project title:

  • The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized

 

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

 

Tell us something about you and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • This project was something I had been thinking about for years. In part, it grew out of a question I had in graduate school: why weren’t more scholars studying American state and local government? So, beginning with the premise that scholarship on the U.S. takes a disproportionate interest in federal politics, I then started to wonder whether scholarship was mirroring a deeper trend in political behavior.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • America has a federalist system but a highly nationalized electorate, an electorate that is focused disproportionately on federal politics. The book documents that nationalization and points to two explanations: the changing media environment and shifts in the political parties.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • One of the key explanations for the nationalization of Americans’ political behavior is the changing news media environment. The book documents that state politics has never gotten extensive coverage from media outlets, but as the American news audience shifts online and away from print newspapers, what little information we used to get about state and local politics has dwindled.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? 

  • There’s been great research on this topic since my book, and I frequently find myself thinking, “I wish I thought of that.” The answer is something that I am now working to remedy: I wish I had approached this from a more comparative perspective to begin with. The experiences of countries like Germany and the U.K. can teach us a lot about whether story of nationalization is specific to the U.S.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • This field has been burgeoning, so it’s hard to summarize briefly. My book focused pretty heavily on state-level politics, so research on what this means for local elections is a great direction for future research. In a multiparty system, the basic measures of nationalization that I use can break down, but there’s been valuable recent work on measuring nationalization. It’s also exciting to see cutting-edge experiments and other research designs that can assess the causal role of changes in the media. It’s harder, though, to assess the causal role of audience preferences.

 

What’s next? 

  • I hinted at this before, but with Frederik Hjorth and Gall Sigler, I’ve been asking the same questions of about ten countries outside the U.S. While measuring nationalization in multi-party systems presents new challenges, the general story is that most countries haven’t nationalized to the same extent as the U.S. In some cases, the countries have long been nationalized, while in others, even recent changes in media markets haven’t had a nationalizing effect.

 

 

Awardee Interview: Thomas E. Patterson Best Dissertation Award (2023)

 

Jianing Li

Award won:

  • Thomas E. Patterson Best Dissertation Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Jianing Li, University of South Florida

 

Project title:

  • False Beliefs and “Healthy” Skepticism: Understanding the Multilevel and Enduring Challenges of Misinformation

 

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

 

Tell us something about you and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • Why do we need another project on misinformation? This dissertation challenges a simplistic, oft-pessimistic story that “people will just believe in misinformation confirming their bias.” The theory of motivated reasoning has been one of the most widely used frameworks in research on misinformation. The mainstay of this research tends to highlight one of the two motivations proposed by the theory – the strong influence of directional motivation (i.e., people are motivated to reach a particular conclusion). It is not surprising that abundant research finds partisanship to be a strong prior stance that serves as a directional force in motivating why people believe in misinformation. This dissertation investigates the boundary conditions for the decades-old story on partisan motivated misinformation processing, revealing conditions where the effects of partisan motivated reasoning are muted or counterbalanced: it highlights the role of local context in anchoring how people consume information and develop misinformed beliefs, and shows a promising pathway of fostering accuracy-motivated skepticism to address misinformation in a contentious political climate.
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Summarize the main takeaway of your project:

  • This dissertation is a study about how people make (mis)informed decisions in the contemporary media environment where there are growing concerns over misinformation, structural inequalities, and the power of platforms.
  • Using a mixed-methods approach, this dissertation answers two major questions. First, how do beliefs in misinformation develop as a function of multilevel mechanisms, not only as a result of individual identities and preferences, but also as a result of mass media structures that impose contextual influences beyond individual choices? I show that disparities in local newspaper context across communities uniquely influence people’s beliefs. When living in a community without a local newspaper, people are more likely to form false beliefs about COVID-19 and politics.
  • Second, this dissertation asks: how do we foster “healthy” skepticism that helps citizens address misinformation? I show that not all types of skepticism towards social media misinformation will lead to a better-informed citizenry. I theorize and test two types of skepticism: accuracy- and identity-motivated skepticism. While accuracy-motivated skepticism helps people address misinformation, identity-motivated skepticism has counterproductive effects in political beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • This dissertation takes a mixed-methods, multi-level approach to polcomm: it examines how individual-level political identities, media diets, and skepticism, interact with mass media structures and platform policies, and together shape political beliefs. Triangulating among different techniques including a quasi-experiment that integrated community- and individual-level data, computational classification of social media and news texts, scale construction and a panel survey experiment helps me validate research findings and unpack the different layers of dynamics at play in how individuals, communities, the news media, and social media platforms deal with political misinformation.
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What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? 

  • The most challenging part of this project was to recruit participants living in “news deserts” and to identify the unique effect of local news context against other confounding contextual effects. “News deserts” differ from non-deserts in many ways including being less populous, lower in education and income, and lower in broadband subscription rates. Given these associated digital and socioeconomic inequalities, a matching algorithm was used to construct a sampling frame of counties with different numbers of local newspapers but otherwise similar in a range of county-level features. This sampling frame was then used to recruit participants, with more resources used to recruit people living in “news deserts.” A series of robustness tests confirmed that local news context has a unique influence beyond individual-level predictors and county-level population, age, income, race, education, broadband subscription, political climate, rurality, and geography.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • This dissertation raises bigger questions still yet to be answered. First, while most misinformation research focuses on falsehoods spread on the national and global level, research can benefit from paying attention to locally relevant misinformation and misperceptions, the role of local community contexts, and the influence of local actors (local news, local politicians, and local opinion leaders).
  • Further, recognizing that misinformation is a multilevel and enduring problem without a panacea, it is also crucial to continue to reflect on who holds the power of defining and mitigating misinformation, who must be held accountable, in what communities and for whom misinformation is doing disproportionate harm, how to empower citizens to navigate the digital communication landscape, and how misinformation research can contribute to an equitable and just society and a well-functioning democracy.

 

What’s next? 

  • I build on the concepts of accuracy- and identity-motivated skepticism developed in this dissertation in a collaborative project with a civic engagement organization. In this follow-up study, we use field experiments to develop and test real-world messages about accuracy-motivated skepticism that can be used by media partitioners and educators on the ground to improve people’s ability to detect misinformation.
  • In other ongoing work, I advance the line of work on how misinformation has a disproportionate impact on underserved and marginalized groups, including studying misinformation correction and solidarity-building in face of racialized misinformation against Black and Asian communities.

 

 

Awardee Interview: Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student Paper (2023)

Award won:

Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student Paper Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

Rachel Smilan-Goldstein, Stanford University

 

Project title:

“The Gendered Political Consequences of Racialized Sexual Threats.”

 

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

Smilan-Goldstein, Rachel. 2024. “The Gendered Political Consequences of Racialized Sexual Threats.” Political Research Quarterly. (Online first.) https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241246532

 

Tell us something about you and how and why you decided to focus on this research

This paper was part of my dissertation project, which argues Americans’ understanding of politics is co-constructed with intersecting ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. In the dissertation, I assess the modern impact of a central historical myth in American culture and politics: the idea that Black men threaten the chastity and safety of White women. Emphasis on this racialized sexual threat has been widely mobilized throughout American history to justify policies that restrict the rights of Black men and ostensibly protect White women.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

Racialized sexual violence threats are unique from messages of solely racial threat: they make both racial & gendered attitudes salient for political outcomes including vote choice, criminal sentencing, & felon disenfranchisement. Racialized sexual threats have distinct effects by individuals’ race & gender.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

This is a framing effects paper that builds on decades of work on racial priming and a growing body of work on gender priming. The project reexamines a well-known example in American political communication: the “Willie Horton” ad aired on behalf of the Bush campaign in 1988.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? 

I don’t know I’d do anything differently, but the most challenging part of this project was the framing of the paper. Prior research on the “Willie Horton” ad has focused on implicit versus explicit racial priming, but I needed to make clear this was not the focus of my project. I was able to acknowledge this debate, while keeping the paper focused on my distinct research question, through many revisions and the invaluable advice of my dissertation committee.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

There is a growing body of work that examines effects of messages that activate multiple types of prejudice at the same time. No one article will explain all the complex intersections of how racism and sexism (and other forms of prejudice) operate in political communication, so it is crucial that scholars continue to study these topics simultaneously.

 

What’s next?

I’m interested in how similar narratives of sexual violence threat are used against transgender women in current anti-transgender political discourse. I am in the beginning stages of a paper on this topic.

 

 

 

Awardee Interview: The IJPP Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award (2023)

Scott Althaus accepting the 2023 IJPP Best Book Award from Cristian Vaccari at ICA
Scott Althaus accepting the 2023 IJPP Best Book Award from Cristian Vaccari at ICA

Award won:

  • The International Journal of Press/Politics Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award, 2023

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Gadi Wolfsfeld, Reichman University
  • Tamir Sheafer, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Scott Althaus, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

 

Project title:

  • Building Theory in Political Communication: The Politics-Media-Politics Approach. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

 

Publication reference:

  • Building Theory in Political Communication: The Politics-Media-Politics Approach. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • The book project started in 2013 when Tamir and Gadi drafted a coauthored paper for the American Political Science Association conference that proposed using the PMP approach as an organizing principle to help scholars adopt a more comprehensive approach to thinking about political communication. An extended email conversation about that paper with Scott resulted in a rough outline for a coauthored book that was shared among the three of us in October 2013. What got all three of us excited about writing this book was the pressing need in political communication, then as now, to cumulate research insights across specialty literatures, countries, and time periods so that as a field we could develop better theory that leads to more rigorous hypothesis testing. The resulting book is a step in that direction.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • Building Theory in Political Communication presents the first generalizable conceptual framework for political communication that is also falsifiable, explaining how media performance contributes to successful political performance across nations, regime types and information systems. The book adapts, refines, and extends the Politics-Media-Politics (PMP) principle, which states that variations in political ecosystems have a major impact on media systems, values, practices, and resources, which can then have dependent, independent, and conditional effects on political processes. With an emphasis on international comparative studies encompassing diverse political systems, the book’s theoretical argument moves beyond the field’s Western focus to show that PMP is useful in a wide range of contexts and research literatures.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • The times are good for political communication research, and yet the field is also straining under the weight of its own successes. Against the ever-growing variety and scale of empirical studies, the theoretical moorings of political communication research are increasingly overextended and underexamined. The opportunities to conduct innovative research on a wide range of political communication phenomena using diverse and nuanced data sources have never been more promising, and yet our ability to synthesize insights across research literature and make collective sense of what we are finding has never been more wanting.
  • We see three tensions within political communication research that exacerbate theoretical disorientation. First, although media independence from political power is widely seen as important, it remains hazily conceived, is rarely tested, and is itself a major factor in degrading effective communication between citizens and governments. Second, most of the places our field has studied for empirical insights are WEIRD: western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But most of the world is not. So while we know (or think we know) a great deal about how political communication works in the advanced democracies of Western Europe and North America, we know far less about how any of this applies to anywhere else in the world. Third, the field of political communication has aspired for decades to accumulate empirical insights relevant for the practice of democracy without quite managing ever to get around to building theory. At least, not the kind of theory that could potentially be falsified. Instead, we are good at building interpretive frameworks that pose as theories. These frameworks are necessary steps in theory construction, and there is no shame in building them. But they are intermediary steps. To realize their potential, they must then give birth to claims taking the form of predictions – claims that can be tested and potentially falsified by others. This is basic science. But instead of going the next step to generate falsifiable hypotheses, our field’s interpretive frameworks have tended to bloat outward to absorb any exceptions and anomalies that fail to confirm to initial intuitions.
  • Gaining momentum against these problems requires a few elements that this book aims to supply. First, we need common points of conceptual reference to better align disparate literatures in ways that cumulate, integrate, and synthesize knowledge across specialty areas. Second, we need a clear focus on the larger systems and dynamic processes in which specific political communication phenomena are situated, so we can better see the connections between seemingly unrelated topics. Third, we need clearly defined evaluative criteria for assessing the performance of media and political activity to replace familiar expressions of knowing disappointment when media systems fail to live up to vaunted expectations. Fourth, we need these evaluative criteria to be useful across regime types (not just advanced democracies of the northern hemisphere). Fifth, we need new theoretical vistas for understanding systems of political communication that can move the field past interpretive frameworks and toward development of testable hypotheses. This book aims to start a larger conversation that will gradually supply these needed elements. We sketch a generalizable conceptual map which should have broad utility across multiple subfields, which provides some guidelines for moving beyond WEIRD cases, is agnostic to communication technologies, is capable of stimulating development of testable hypotheses, and holds potential for enduring value to the field.
  • The book’s chapters aim to illustrate this concept map’s basic components, demonstrate how to apply it, and showcase its usefulness. The ultimate goal of this volume is to contribute to the joint effort for building cumulative knowledge in the field of political communication. We do so by adapting, refining, and extending Gadi’s Politics Media Politics (PMP) principle. We think of the PMP approach as an intentionally broad conceptual map that we hope will be adopted and adapted by other researchers working in the field. The book’s chapters aim to illustrate this concept map’s basic components, demonstrate how to apply it, and showcase its usefulness. Taken together, the book’s chapters serve to provide:
  • A general conceptual framework for synthesizing and integrating research findings across disparate strands of the political communication literature;
  • That can be applied cross-nationally and over time;
  • To assess how media performance might usefully contribute to successful political performance;
  • Across a wide range of regime types and information systems;
  • With the purpose of cumulating knowledge across diverse and specialized research communities;
  • To increase the efficiency, relevance, and practical importance of scholarly research on the practices of political communication around the world.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

  • We wish we had been able to finish it in less time! The most challenging part of the project was coordinating things remotely since the three of us weren’t all in the same place. Even though we could organize Zoom meetings and send chapter drafts over email, nothing replaced the importance of “face to face” meetings in developing the theoretical concept map that the book presents. So we took every advantage to meet in person at academic conferences and workshops, and eventually we were able to complete the book. The second most challenging part was developing the language for a conceptual framework that could stand outside particular places and times and communication technologies. We wanted the book’s concept map to be used by political communication scholars anywhere in the world, looking at different aspects of communication ecosystems, across different types of political regimes, and at different points in history. We think we have accomplished this, but it took us a long time to work through alternative concepts and labels before we became convinced that the resulting elements presented in the book had the potential to meet this lofty ambition. We accomplished this by taking time to not rush things prematurely. So in the end, our second most challenging problem was solved by the first most challenging problem, because our delays in moving the book forward gave us plenty of time to refine and revisit our framework until we felt very confident in its utility.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • Given the complexity of contemporary communication ecosystems, it is far easier today for scholars to do good empirical work than to do good theoretical work, and to focus on narrow superspecialty problems rather than to make our research relevant and understandable to people who aren’t already familiar with the narrow research questions that we’re individually pursuing. We hope that our book will lead more researchers to adapt the PMP approach to their own research, so that we can collectively advance the quality of both empirical and theoretical contributions within the field.

 

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

  • Because we’ve been thinking about the PMP approach for a lot longer than any of our readers, we’re brimming with ideas about how to apply it to more cases studies and countries. All three of us will probably be adapting it in different ways to our respective areas of research specialization, but we hope that the immediate next step is something much bigger than the three of us will be producing on our own. Our larger aim with the book is to help political communication scholars build globally-relevant theory together. We hope the book sparks a larger scholarly conversation about how to build theory in political communication that overcomes the problems we’ve identified in ways that can move our field onto firmer theoretical (and empirical) ground. This would be the most satisfying follow-up project that we can think of.

Awardee Interview: Walter Lippmann Best Published Paper Award (2023)

Jessica Feezell presenting the Walter Lippmann Best Published Article Award to Patricia Rossini

Award won:

  • Walter Lippmann Best Published Paper Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Patrícia Rossini, Senior Lecturer in Communication, Media & Democracy in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow

 

Project title:

  • Beyond Incivility: Understanding Patterns of Uncivil and Intolerant Discourse in Online Political Talk.

 

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

  •  
  • Rossini, P. (2022). Beyond Incivility: Understanding Patterns of Uncivil and Intolerant Discourse in Online Political Talk. Communication Research, 49(3), 399–425. https://doi.org/10/gkfj98

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • This paper summarizes the main findings of my PhD research. I originally started my PhD journey thinking about online political talk in more normative terms, aligned with scholarship in deliberation and the public sphere. Reading the literature on online political talk, though, I was surprised by the intense focus on incivility and lack of ‘respect’ as an inherently undesirable characteristic of political conversations, and realized that scholars were neglecting types of opinion expression that are more problematic in Hence, I decided to develop a content analysis scheme that disentangled tone and substance to understand the different conditions under which antinormative discourse manifests online.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • My work advances a conceptual model that disentangles uncivil and intolerant online political talk, enabling scholars to disentangle discourse that is harmful from expressions that are not, and demonstrates that these two types of discourse occur under different conditions.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • This project considers one of the core concerns of polcomm—informal political conversations—and advances its understanding by advancing a nuanced account of how people express their political opinions online, and how antinormative political talk may be facilitated by platform affordances.
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What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

  • As with any doctoral research, there are things I would have done differently if I knew at the time. I would have tried to develop supervised machine learning models to detect uncivil and intolerant discourse at scale if I had the skills to do so back then—something that I only accomplished more recently, and in English language. I would also have expanded the platform comparisons beyond online news websites and Facebook, which I did not have the resources to do. Looking back, I am proud of what this project accomplished considering the conditions under which I developed it as a PhD student in Brazil.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • There’s been a lot more work on perceptions of antinormative discourse—including, but also beyond incivility—that goes in the same direction of what I argued in this paper: people are not universally affected by incivility, and incivility alone is not enough to undermine the value of political talk. I would like to see this work on perceptions and differential effects continue to develop, as well as a consideration of how antinormative discourse affects bystanders. There’s been much less focus on more harmful online expressions—which I define as intolerant—, and I think that’s the direction for future work.

 

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

  • I’ve been doing many related things since this project. I followed up on this conceptual model as part of a collaborative grant funded by Twitter, which enabled me to develop algorithms to detect five subtypes of incivility and two subtypes of intolerance—which is a lot more nuanced than more common binary approaches to this task. I also have another on-going project focused on perceptions of intolerance. More broadly, my research has considered other digital threats to democracy, like misinformation and disinformation.

 

  • Bianchi, F., HIlls, S., Rossini, P., Hovy, D., Tromble, R., & Tintarev, N. (2022). “It’s Not Just Hate”: A Multi-Dimensional Perspective on Detecting Harmful Speech Online. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 8093–8099. https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.553

 

 

 

Awardee Interview: Kaid-Sanders Best Article of the Year (2023)

le-ri: Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen; Hans H. Tung; Wen-Chin Wu

Award won:

  • Kaid-Sanders Best Political Communication Article of the Year Award (2023)
  •  

Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen (Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Political Science, Academic Sinica)
  • Hans H. Tung (Professor, Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University)
  • Wen-Chin Wu (Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Political Science, Academic Sinica)
  •  

Project title:

  • Power Sharing and Media Freedom in Dictatorships
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Publication reference:

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • Since 2017, we have worked together as a team to investigate various issues surrounding the politics of media freedom in dictatorships on both theoretical and empirical fronts. Up to now, we have collectively published more than five peer-review articles in academic journals. From the very beginning of our collaboration, we all felt there was a lack of enough theoretical discussions as well as solid empirical works on dictators’ commitment problem and how it affected media freedom in authoritarian regimes. Especially, there was a lacuna on how this problem played out in the intra-elite power sharing relationship under dictatorships. We therefore decided to embark on various projects that examined this question systematically.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • The paper develops a new power-sharing theory of media freedom under dictatorships and demonstrates quantitatively that the level of (partial) media freedom in them goes up when the level of their intra-elite power sharing is higher.
  •  

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • The media politics in dictatorships has received lots of scholarly attention among political communication scholars recently. The topics range from how citizens living under authoritarian regimes have their voices heard or banned on the internet to how media outlets and their reports affect political stability in these regimes. Our endeavor contributes to this larger “polcomm project” by endogenizing dictators’ decisions over media freedom to their power-sharing relationship with their political allies.    
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What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?

  • The most challenging part of this project was to put together a dataset with all the variables needed to test our theoretical propositions. The vast majority of authoritarian countries are very opaque and testing our theoretical ideas nonetheless calls for measures of intra-elite interactions in them such as power sharing or elite cohesion. Thanks to several recent data collection projects on dictatorships and media freedom, we were able to overcome the challenge and find convincing evidence for our theory through thorogh quantitative analyses.
  •  

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • Currently, most research in the field of authoritarian politics of media has been centered around the interactions between different mechanics of information/media control and the corresponding state-society relations under dictatorships. Especially, the (partial) media freedom in them is predominantly viewed as its strategy for acquiring information about social reactions to their rule. What we would like to see more of in the future are several new avenues of research our research helps open up.
  • First, while our analyses have taken the first step to disclose the effect of intra-elite power sharing on media freedom under dictatorships, the measures of media freedom in our paper are however all aggregate ones. Since different types of media outlets—e.g., print, broadcast, or internet—might actually have different effects in sustaining intra-elite communications and power-sharing, a natural next step will be more theoretical and empirical endeavors to identify such variegated effects of different media types. Relatedly, as the information and communication technology advances so quickly nowadays, we would also like to encourage the community to investigate how dictatorships with different state capacity adapt to it, not just for meeting new social demands but also for handling intra-elite power dynamics.
  • Second, the findings from our research also add another layer to the recent discussions about digital authoritarianism that mainly focus on how dictators’ newly gained digital power over media freedom enables them to consolidate their social control. However, as far as the survival of an authoritarian regime is concerned, media control is never exclusively about social control, but also about how the regime manages the power sharing relationship among its political elites. More media control might actually undermine the very foundation on which its intra-elite cooperation is based. How do dictators strike a balance between these two objectives? We will need more theoretical investigations and data collections to answer this question.
  •  

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

  • Based on our previous publications on the authoritarian politics of media, we continue to broaden our scope of investigation in addition to the directions suggested above. First, based on our new game-theoretic publication where we investigate formally conditions under which the media engage in self-censorship even though the dictator tries to commit to media freedom (Journal of Theoretical Politics, forthcoming), we are designing a lab experiment to empirically test some of its predictions. Second, another collaborative project of ours focuses on how dictators choose between free media and other political institutions to maintain regime stability. This project is also based on the theoretical insights derived from our power sharing project. Finally, our third project tries to find individual-level determinants for ordinary citizens’ support for media censorship in democracies and support for media freedom in autocracies.
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  •  

 

Awardee Interview: Best Dissertation Award (2023)

Andreas Nanz accepting the PolComm Best Dissertation Award from Frank Esser at ICA23

Award won:

  • Political Communication Division Best Dissertation Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Andreas Nanz (University of Vienna, Austria)

 

Project title:

  • Incidental exposure in the online world: Antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences
  •  

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • A few months after starting my PhD position in a funded research project, we stumbled upon a call for papers for Journalism about incidental news exposure. Since I had read a couple of incidental exposure papers a bit prior for another paper, we knew the limitations of the current research in this area and had a couple of ideas for future research. Thus, for the CfP, we decided to write a theoretical paper as a first stepping stone. In the end, it was the political incidental news exposure model (PINE). The dissertation was the empirical test of this model.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • The phenomenon of incidental exposure (IE) is much more nuanced than previously expected. We should distinguish different levels of IE (brief scanning vs. thorough scanning) and not forget that there is a lot of non-political information which might also distract from politics.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • The literature about incidental exposure very much sits at the intersection between communication and political science. Often studies ask the question how media exposes individuals to political content they did not intend to see and what kind of consequences this incidental exposure has for politically relevant variables such as political knowledge or participation. In the final study of the dissertation, we tried to shift this frame a bit by focusing on the impact of non-political incidental exposure on political information processing.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

  • Since I consider writing a dissertation also as somewhat of a “learning journey”, I would do many things differently. For example, I would not try to field a study in schools in the first weeks after the school year starts. Of course, I would also get rid of the typo I recently found in one of my published studies. Regarding challenges, the global pandemic was certainly a bump in the road.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • I think that this sub-field of political communication research has done a big step with and also since the special issue in Journalism in 2020. I’m also thrilled to see that some ideas and approaches from this dissertation found their way into studies by other scholars in the field. In the larger field of political communication, I very much enjoy reading the small but growing bulk of experimental studies that try to recreate or simulate the complexity and fuzziness of contemporary real-life information environments.

 

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

  • The question “what’s next” I have not fully answered yet. But I’m currently involved in multiple projects with colleagues from my team, some also related to political communication. And, there are still two follow-up studies related to the dissertation’s topic in the making. So, stay tuned!

 

 

 

PCR Awardee Questionnaire: Walter Lippman Best Paper in Political Communication (2022)

PCR Awardee Questionnaire: Walter Lippman Best Paper in Political Communication (2022)

 

le-ri: Constantine Boussalis, Travis Coan, Mirya R. Holman, Stefan Müller
Name(s) & affiliation:
  • Constantine Boussalis, Trinity College, Dublin
  • Travis Coan, University of Exeter & Exeter Q-Step Centre
  • Mirya R. Holman, Tulane University
  • Stefan Müller, University College Dublin

 

Project title:
  • Gender, Candidate Emotional Expression, and Voter Reactions During Televised Debates
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Publication reference, link (APA 7th):
  • Boussalis, Constantine, Travis Coan, Mirya R. Holman, and Stefan Müller. 2021. “Gender, Candidate Emotional Expression, and Voter Reactions During Televised Debates.” American Political Science Review 115 (4): 1242-1257. 1017/S0003055421000666

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research
  • This was a true meeting of the minds project! The research team brought together Constantine and Travis, who had previously used video as data in debates, Stefan, an expert on text analysis and German politics, and Mirya, whose expertise is in gender and politics and gender role theory. For a major project that involved a lot of moving parts, the paper emerged quite quickly!

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.
  • Men & women in politics use their faces & voices to convey emotions to voters but are constrained by gender roles. We use videos of 5 German debates to study emotion in political communication. Angela Merkel + minor party women are less angry but just as emotional. Voters reward women’s happiness & punish their anger.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?
  • We focus on how the gender of political elites influences how they communicate to the public during political debates by analyzing video, sound, and text! We dig into each kind of analysis and look at how the communication of emotions via each of these channels shapes voter reactions.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)
  • We completed the entirety of the project during COVID, over zoom! It would have been really nice to work together in person. Regular meetings (once a week for 6 straight months!) helped keep us on track.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?
  • We love all the work using images, video, vocal pitch, and text as measures of political communication and hope that others continue to pursue these research areas.

 

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)
  • Some of the research team has been leaning into a project on images as data, using social media posts from members of the US national legislature. We are also interested in how political elites use emotions to convey issue expertise and to overcome gender stereotypes.

 

 

 

 

PCR Awardee Questionnaire: IJPP Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award (2022)

PCR Awardee Questionnaire: IJPP Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award (2022)

 

IJPP Editor Cristian Vaccari & Awardee Nikki Usher

 

Name(s) & affiliation:
  • Nikki Usher, PhD, University of San Diego

 

Project title:
  • News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism

 

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):
  • Usher, N. (2021). News for the rich, white, and blue: How place and power distort American journalism. Columbia University Press.

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research
  • In 2016, after living and working in DC at the George Washington University, and watching Trump get elected despite all the news media predictions to the contrary, and watching a moral panic about declining trust in journalism, I realized that I had an intervention to make. My understanding of place as power only grew once I moved to the heartland (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). By understanding journalism through the lens of place, I could also critique how journalism reified power and how the political economy of the contemporary news industry meant increasingly unequal access to news and information for rural dwellers and marginalized communities in the urban US.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.
  • In the quest to survive, news organizations are realigning their priorities in ways that favor audiences who are willing to pay (rich, either in terms of cultural or actual capital), face huge barriers to diversifying and remain stubbornly white institutions, and increasingly, end up serving liberal blue audiences.
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What made this project a “polcomm project”?
  • This book is a story about journalism, power, and democracy, and provides a critical look at the way that elite, institutional news media are undermining democratic life through a refusal to consider blind spots that are only growing. In some ways, it is a classic polcomm project (including quantitative analyses of news provision and partisanship); in other ways, its roots in qualitative research and engagement with race, class, and geography and the focus on the newsroom as a starting point for considering power and democracy make it quite different from standard political communication work.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)
  • The most challenging part of this project was finishing a book during COVID. I do not understand how the book got finished, other than the fact that I woke up with a burning frustration every night and as a result, found time to write and edit with a small child home from school.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?
  • We often critique projects for being too US-centric. And I get that. But the US is the world’s oldest “representative” democracy, and the democratically-organized hijacking of democratic life by the Republican party is a story of organizing, information pollution, inequality, and racism that deserves deep engagement cross-culturally and cross-nationally.

 

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)
  • Completely new direction: I’ve been awarded a Mellon New Directions Fellowship to pursue training in a second discipline in applied stats and economics. Who knows what happens next. Currently fascinated by tolerances for various levels of corruption in democracies and overall functioning (or not) and trust in democratic institutions.