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ABSTRACT
Mass media are frequently cited as having the potential to inform the public, raising knowledge levels and reducing political knowledge gaps between citizens. But media are also seen as a force for segmentation, disengagement, and widening differences between citizens. If media have no effect on political knowledge, gaps between the engaged and disengaged persist regardless of who is exposed to news because no one learns. But gaps can also persist even if everyone learns from the news, particularly if learning effects are heterogeneous across those inclined and disinclined to seek out news and/or across environments that consist of different media alternatives. Yet past research on political communication has not sufficiently linked media choice to debates about possibly heterogeneous effects of media exposure on political knowledge levels. The present study contributes a novel and large-scale choice-based experiment on knowledge of the ongoing crisis in Syria that finds media effects are relatively homogeneous across those with different media preferences and across different media environments. This suggests that under most conditions – even when everyone learns from the news – knowledge gaps between the politically engaged and disengaged are widened or at least sustained after incidental exposure to politics. While closing such gaps may be impossible, the results have important implications for understanding how citizens learn about politics and how to study learning from self-selected media experiences.
Acknowledgments
The author graciously acknowledges support from NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant SES-1160156. This paper also reports survey results found through searches of the iPoll databank and archives of the Roper Center for Public Opinon Research. Data, replication code, and experimental materials will be available on the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FV9AVG. Thanks are due to Kevin Arceneaux, Jason Barabas, Matt Baum, Hajo Boomgaarden, Jamie Druckman, Frederik Hjorth, Shanto Iyengar, Jenn Jerit, Matt Levendusky, Paul Marx, Rasmus Tue Pedersen, Markus Prior, and Josh Robison, as well as seminar participants at Aarhus University, the London School of Economics, McGill University, Lousiana State University, Pompeu Fabra University, the European University Institute, and the reviewers and editor at BJPS for helpful feedback on various stages of this project. This paper was previously presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Danish Political Science Association, Vejle, Denmark, and the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Data Availability Statement
The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FV9AVG.
Open Scholarship
This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FV9AVG.
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1753866.
Notes
1. Whereas previous efforts to understand incidental exposure to political information have used surveys to measure self-reported exposure to the types of programs that might contain incidental political content (e.g., late-night satirical news or soft news programs; Baek & Wojcieszak, Citation2009; Brewer & Cao, Citation2006; Kim & Vishak, Citation2008; Xenos & Becker, Citation2009), the patient preference trial clearly disentangles selection from effects. Gaines and Kuklinski (Citation2011b) and T. J. Leeper (Citation2017) use this design to assess effects of a short textual vignette on opinions for those inclined and disinclined to select the vignette but (a) focus on opinion outcomes rather than knowledge, and (b) use experimental stimuli that – like Levendusky (Citation2013) – that do not respect the participant’s content preference. The present design attempts to mitigate the risks of that approach.
2. One concern is that assignment to the preference trial arm of the study had a direct effect on the outcomes. This does not appear to have been the case as the outcome (issue knowledge) did not differ between those receiving the news content in the preference trial (x = 0.49) compared to those in captive conditions (x = 0.49, t = 0.22, p ≤ 0.83), nor between those in the preference trial (x = 0.32) and random assignment (x = 0.33) conditions who were ultimately assigned to entertainment content (t = 0.29, p ≤ 0.78). Given that the assignment to the preference trial and random assignments arms of the experiment appeared inconsequential, the exclusion restriction does not appear to have been violated.
3. Though these choice sets are also stylized, they are meant to represent the ecological conditions that individuals face in a dynamic high–choice landscape and capture institutional variations in the availability of news and entertainment.
4. Supplemental Appendix E further shows that the randomization into different choice sets appeared to have no direct effect on any outcome variable.
5. An alternative analytic approach would be to use estimators defined by Gaines and Kuklinski (Citation2011b). Results using this approach are included in Supplemental Appendix C and are substantively and statistically identical to those reported in the body of the paper.
6. Answers based upon the question “Do you think the United States has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria between government forces and anti-government groups, or doesn’t the United States have this responsibility?” from iPoll study USORC.021412B, 2/10–2/13/2012.
7. iPoll study USORC.060612A, 5/29–5/31/2012.
8. Answers based upon the question “In general, how concerned are you about the situation in Syria–very concerned, somewhat concerned, not very concerned, or not concerned at all?” from iPoll study USORC.081512, 8/7–8/8/2012.
9. “Would you favor or oppose the US (United States) and other countries using military airplanes and missiles to try to establish zones inside Syria where the opposition forces would be safe from attacks by the Syrian government?”.
10. “And would you favor or oppose the US (United States) and other countries using ground troops to try to establish zones inside Syria where the opposition forces would be safe from attacks by the Syrian government?”.
11. The study also measured issue attitudes and attitude certainty. Details on these results are included in Supplemental Appendix D.
12. “Don’t know” and blank responses were treated as incorrect. Supplemental Appendix C reports, among other things, the mean number of “don’t know” responses to each item. These proportions tended to be high overall, with the mean number of such responses being 1.88.
13. This level of pay does not meet current ethical requirements of pay for workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, who generally see themselves as workers rather than research volunteers, should rightly be paid at least United States federal minimum wage for their time. At the time of the study (2012), Amazon Mechanical Turk was a quite new platform for participant recruitment and this rate of compensation was unfortunately conventional.
14. Participants were also invited to participate in a follow-up wave of interviewing (time 2) three weeks after completing the first wave with an eye toward understanding the durability of learning over-time.Pparticipants were recontacted using MTurkR (T. J. Leeper, Citation2013) via an e-mail with the subject line “Complete 5-minute follow-up survey for $.25.” and body that read as follows: “Thanks for completing my survey a few weeks ago. Complete a 5-minute follow-up survey (20 questions) to earn a $.25 bonus. You can complete the survey the link below: {LinkToStudy} Thanks so much for your participation! Bonuses will be paid in a few days.” The recontact rate for the second wave was 62%, with all responses gathered between October 25 and October 30, 2012. Despite some attrition by time 2, demographics for those participating in both panel waves were similar to the overall sample: 61.7% were female; 79.5% were white, 6.0% were African American, 6.7% were Asian American, 4.7% were Hispanic; 53.0% had college degrees; the median age range was 25–34; 36.5% were Democrats and 39.8% were Republicans; 50.6% identified as liberal; and levels of general political and interest were identical to the those for the whole sample. The key finding for the over-time results is that those who were assigned to entertainment conditions learned about the issue between time 1 and time 2 (or cheated on their answers in the time 2 responses), while those assigned to news conditions retained their knowledge over time. Full results for time 2 are reported in the Supplemental Appendix.
15. Note: those in captive conditions were not given an option to behaviorally express a preference for a type of content, therefore it is not possible to divide them based upon such a preference.
16. Noteworthy, however, is that by two to three weeks after exposure, the effects of news also dissipates uniformly across all types of individuals in all conditions because those assigned to the entertainment story showed a slight increase in knowledge over the post-treatment period. See Supplemental Appendix C for full results. This may reflect participants search for information outside of the experiment (see Druckman et al., Citation2012), or possibly some cheating behavior on the part of participants. Unfortunately, it is not possible to test either of these possibilities.
Additional information
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Notes on contributors
Thomas J. Leeper
Thomas J. Leeper is Senior Visiting in Methodology in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.