Laughing Our Way to a Stronger Democracy: Political Comedy’s Potential to Equalize Political Interest in Community College Students

ABSTRACT

What effect does political comedy have on political interest? Through an experimental design, changes in political interest are measured through a pre and posttest, comparing groups randomly assigned to watch The Daily Show, NBC Nightly News, Entertainment Tonight and a no-exposure group. Models indicate political comedy significantly affects political interest, measured through a unique 40-point index.

KEYWORDS:

• Political interest
• political comedy
• political learning
• news media
• political participation

Notes

The approximately 25 percentage point difference between African American students in the study and those in the community college population nationally is noteworthy; however, testing the effects of my independent variable did not yield different results when controlling for race. Thus, the difference in the sample and actual population should not diminish the generalizability of the findings.

Other possible confounding variables for which I tested included a political science dummy variable. Some students in the treatment groups were taking a political science class, while this was not the case for students in the no-exposure control group. The political science dummy was not significant and itself weakened the model, as the standard errors increased when including it. Removing the pretest political-interest-index score, however, weakened the model.

Ideally, a similar measure of current events evaluation would be available for the control group, as it would allow us to assess the difference in The Daily Show group and the no-exposure control group. Because this pairwise comparison has emerged as consistently significant, it would be helpful to compare the groups along this measure. However, given that the objective of my experiment was, in part, to compare those with the additional current events exposure to those who had no change in viewing, developing this measure would have been impractical. This is especially true considering the very little time participants spent watching current events outside of the study.

In consideration of any pretreatment biases, specifically, that participants may already have been exposed to The Daily Show prior to the study, I recalculated the ANOVA after removing participants who, on their pretest, indicated that they were a viewer of the program. In removing TDS viewers from the sample, the ANOVA results held, with the only significant difference between TDS and the no-exposure control group.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Lawrason

Lisa Lawrason, PhD, is a professor of political science at Delta College, where she has taught American politics and Constitutional issues courses for 11 years. Both inside and outside the classroom, she devotes her efforts to politically empowering community college students, inviting them to engage in the civic lives of their community and providing opportunities to do so. Through her efforts, Delta College has become a national leader in civic engagement. The college is one of the original 23 signatory institutions to The Democracy Commitment — a national association of community colleges dedicated to preparing students for active citizenship — and Lawrason is a co-campus coordinator of this initiative. In this role, she has spearheaded projects such as Public Achievement, in which college students mentor K–12 students through a process of identifying and addressing issues in their school/community. She has also written a political action manual for college students, guiding them through a process of organizing others to effect positive change. Her work on this and other initiatives has been highlighted in several presentations at the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Meeting. Most recently, her work on assessing the impact of civic-engagement projects on political attitudes and future participation has garnered interest not only at The Democracy Commitment meeting but also by the League for Innovation. She is also the advisor for the Citizens in Action student club and the chair for Delta’s Civic Engagement General Education Resource Group and serves on the national board of directors for The Democracy Commitment. Lawrason is a past president of the Michigan Political Science Association and has presented numerous times at its annual meeting, where she won the best paper award in 2014. Lawrason is a two-time recipient of the King-Chavez-Parks fellowship and a three-time recipient of the Graduate Professional Scholarship at Wayne State. She is a recipient of the Don and Betty Carlyon Endowed Teaching Chair and Michigan Campus Compact’s Community Service Learning award. She is a recipient of the Don Laughner Award for Creative Change at Delta College.