Abating Dissonant Public Spheres: Exploring the Effects of Affective, Ideological and Perceived Societal Political Polarization on Social Media Political Persuasion

ABSTRACT

Prior research underscores the utility of political persuasion to sustain more engaged democracies and as a vital element in political campaigning processes. When citizens display increased openness to political attitude change, societies benefit as diverse viewpoints thrive, and less dissonant public spheres may be fostered. This contrasts with today’s contentious political and media environment. With political polarization on the rise, and new social media avenues enabling citizens to curate more diverse news consumption patterns, little is known about how this polarization influences the ability for citizens to be politically persuaded in social media environments. Relying on representative US panel survey data, this study seeks to shed light on this phenomenon by testing the effects of three distinct types of political polarization: Affective, ideological, and perceived societal. Panel autoregressive causal order regression and structural equation models clarify the direct and indirect negative role of polarization in predicting social media political persuasion. Theoretical implications of these findings, limitations of the study, and suggestions for future research are all discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media political persuasion
• political polarization
• social media news use
• dissonant public spheres
• democracy

Acknowledgement

The authors are thankful to all journal Editors and the three anonymous reviewers who provided useful suggestions to make this study stronger.

The first author is also funded by the ‘Beatriz Galindo Program’ from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities, and the Junta de Castilla y León.

Responsibility for the information and views set out in this study lies entirely with the authors.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2139310

Notes

1. Cooperation rates (COOP) are here defined as “The proportion of all cases interviewed of all eligible units ever contacted.” (AAPOR, 2016). Different methods are available to calculate cooperation rates according to the standards of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). We report COOP2, which takes into account both complete and partial interviews as respondents (AAPOR, 2016, p. 63).

2. Although the introduction to the questions speaks of news, and despite of previous empirical validation that confirms the political orientation of the responses, only one of the three questions refers explicitly to political issues (the third one). We repeated all analysis using this third question as dependent variable. As expected, main results remain the same: affective polarization is negatively related to this indicator of SM persuasion.

3. To make sure that diversity of feelings toward politicians of the same party was not biasing the indicator (e.g., individuals feeling very positive about Pence but very negative about Trump) we performed a correlation test. Correlation of feelings between Obama and Biden ranks as high as .80, and it is very similar for Trump and Pence, reaching 0.83 (both significant at p < .001).

4. This is the distribution for our sociodemographic controls in W1. Age: 7% between 18 and 22 years old; 32.3% between 25 and 35 years old; 39.8% between 36 and 55 years old; 28.1% 56 or older. Gender: 53.1% female; 46.6% male; 0.22% other. Race: 74% white; 26% other. Education: Less than high school: 4%, High school: 31%, Some college: 25%, Bachelor’s degree: 12%, Some graduate education: 7%, Professional certificate: 4%, Master’s degree: 16%, Doctoral degree: 2%. Income: 58% above the median income.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish National Research Agency’s Program for the Generation of Knowledge and the Scientific and Technological Strengthening Research + Development [PID2020-115562GB-I00].

Notes on contributors

Homero Gil De Zúñiga

Homero Gil de Zúñiga is Distinguished Research Professor at University of Salamanca and serves as director of the Democracy Research Unit (DRU). He is also Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and Senior Research Fellow at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. In general, his work draws from theoretically driven research, aiming to shed an empirical social scientific light over how social media, algorithms, AI, and other technologies affect society and democracy.

Hugo Marcos Marné

Hugo Marcos Marné is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Salamanca, and member of the Democracy Research Unit (DRU) at the same institution. His research focuses on public opinion, electoral behavior, populism, and national identities.

Emily Carty

Emily Carty is currently a Profesora Asociada in the department of Political Science and in the Center for Global and International Studies, and a member of the Democracy Research Unit (DRU) at the University of Salamanca. Her research lies primarily within the fields of political psychology and political behavior.