Less critical and less informed: undecided voters’ media (dis)engagement during Israel’s April 2019 elections

ABSTRACT

The growing number of undecided voters has attracted a lot of interest due to its important role in determining election results. Many studies have addressed the media consumption of undecideds but few have examined the role of undecideds’ attitudes towards the media institution. This paper is innovative in its attempt to address the issue of the role of media trust in undecided versus decided voters’ media engagement, based on a survey (N = 1427) followed by a multivariate analysis during the Israeli April 2019 elections campaign. The analysis revealed that although decided voters have more doubt in the accuracy of the news media, they still consume more news from more diverse sources, highlighting decideds as more critical and simultaneously more informed than undecideds. A parallel experiment (N = 121) identified that undecideds tended to rank a fake news item shared by one of their Facebook friends as credible significantly more often than decideds, demonstrating undecideds’ lower critical ability to identify misinformation. The present study highlights the under-explored roles of undecideds (mis)trust of the news media and high susceptibility to believe fake news items, thus adding new evidence to the notion that elections are often won by the least informed and least critical citizens. We discuss the grim implications of our findings to current literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Undecideds
• Facebook
• elections
• epistemic bubbles
• media trust

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The survey was conducted between 7 and 17 March 2019.

2 iPanel recruits its large pool of respondents in various ways – using both traditional and online methods of recruitments (on social network and other websites). Respondents are asked to take part in periodic surveys in exchange for incentives (gift cards). The entire pool comprises over 100,000 participants; the average panelist answers two or three surveys per month, but no minimum is required (Dvir-Gvirsman, 2015).

3 All the information regarding the Israeli society was take from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (https://www.cbs.gov.il/EN/pages/default.aspx).

4 We had chosen the 60% threshold following a conversation with one of Israel’s leading polls conductor – Dr. Mina Tzemach. According to her data, about 20-25% of Israelis were undecideds in the April 2019 elections. When we compared this data, with ours regarding the level of certainty scale, it appeared that the threshold of undecided voters was 60%.

5 As part of the recruitment and preparation process for the experiment, participants were asked to become Facebook friends with a dedicated Facebook account, created specifically for this study. After the participants became friends of the account, and following their formal consent, we ran a script that collected data from the participants’ Facebook profiles. Specifically, the list of friends of each participant was collected. Through this process, we were able to get a name of a real Facebook friend of each of our participants, and then present our participants with a story that friend presumably shared on Facebook.

6 The model shows 2% of the variance in traditional media consumption, 14.2% of the variance in the trust in traditional media, and 8.5% of the variance in the doubt regarding traditional media information accuracy.

7 P = 0.074

8 The model shows 2.9% of the variance in traditional media consumption, 14.2% of the variance in the trust in traditional media, and 8.3% of the variance in the doubt regarding traditional media information accuracy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tal Samuel-Azran

Tal Samuel-Azran (PhD, University of Melbourne) is the Head of the International Program at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.

Moran Yarchi

Moran Yarchi (Ph.D., Hebrew University) is a Senior Lecturer at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. Her main fields of research are political communication, public diplomacy, media coverage of conflicts and terrorism, and new media.

Tsahi (Zack) Hayat

Dr. Tsahi (Zack) Hayat is a faculty at the Sammy Ofer School of Communication, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel. Dr. Hayat's research focuses complex socio-technical systems, networks of people, artifacts, data and ideas. Dr. Hayat is particularly interested in how new technologies such as tablets, smartphones and social media platforms may enable or hinder the transfer of different resources within social networks.