Matthew Levendusky
Department of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
Forty years ago, viewers who wanted to watch television news had few choices, and could only select among the major broadcast networks, all of which presented the news in a similarly objection fashion. Today viewers have a much broader array of news choices, especially on cable television, and some of those cable channels offer a partisan take on the news, thereby allowing consumers to match their news choices to their ideology.
The return of such partisan sources to the American media landscape has potentially important consequences. America’s constitutional system, with its multiple veto points and separation of powers, requires compromise and consensus. If citizens only hear one side of the issues, and avoid differing views, this may harden their beliefs and make them less willing to compromise with those representing the other side. When that happens, it becomes more difficult for the nation to come together and solve important problems. Our contemporary political discourse is filled with claims that Americans – both masses and elites – are increasingly unwilling to compromise, build a consensus, and find solutions. Do partisan media bear part of the blame for this division? Do partisan media make contemporary American governance more difficult? My recent book, How Partisan Media Polarize America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), tackles these broad questions. In particular, it addresses partisan media’s effects on three broad areas – citizens’ issue positions, their attitudes toward the other party and willingness to compromise with them, and their voting behavior.
The book outlines a set of hypotheses that explain when partisan media will, and will not, affect impact citizens’ behavior and how those effects will differ depending on the context and the viewers’ attributes. It tests these hypotheses using a series of original experiments, as well as panel data collected during the 2008 election. The results demonstrate that partisan media exposure has substantively important consequences for American politics. Partisan media polarize attitudes, but they does so primarily by affecting those who are already more extreme – they lengthen the tails rather than shifting the center of the distribution. They also shape vote choice, and make viewers more likely to accept nefarious interpretations of election outcomes. Further, they make their audience dislike and distrust the opposition, and consequently make viewers less willing to compromise with the other side to find bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems.
Overall, these findings illustrate how partisan media have changed the American political landscape. Exposure to partisan media contributes to the difficulty of governing. These outlets make citizens more extreme, more polarized, and less willing to trust and compromise with those who do not share their partisan identity. It is certainly true that only a small segment of the U.S. population watches partisan media programs, and many Americans tune out these shows (as evidenced by their modest ratings). But these results show that those who do watch are more involved and engaged politically and why, therefore, the impact of these programs is far-reaching. Though the audience for partisan media programs is small, their effect on American politics need not be.