Many blame partisan news media for polarization in America. This paper examines the effects of liberal, conservative, and centrist news on affective and attitude polarization. To this end, we rely on two studies that combine two-wave panel surveys (N1 = 303, N2 = 904) with twelve months worth of web browsing data submitted by the same participants comprising roughly thirty-eight million visits. We identify news exposure using an extensive list of news domains and develop a machine learning classifier to identify exposure to political news within these domains. The results offer a robust pattern of null findings. Exposure to partisan and centrist news websites—no matter if it is congenial or crosscutting—does not enhance polarization. These null effects also emerge among strong and weak partisans as well as Democrats and Republicans alike. We argue that these null results accurately portray the reality of limited effects of news in the “real world.” Politics and partisan news account for a small fraction of citizens’ online activities, less than 2 percent in our trace data, and are nearly unnoticeable in the overall information and communication ecology of most individuals.

Most scholars focus on the prevalence and democratic effects of (partisan) news exposure. This focus misses large parts of online activities of a majority of politically disinterested citizens. Although political content also appears outside of news outlets and may profoundly shape public opinion, its prevalence and effects are under-studied at scale. This project combines three-wave panel survey data from three countries (total N = 6,892) with online behavioral data from the same participants (119.7M visits). We create a multi-lingual classifier to identify political content both in news and outside (e.g. in shopping or entertainment sites). We find that news consumption is infrequent: just 3.4% of participants’ online browsing comprised visits to news sites. Only between 14% (NL) and 36% (US) of these visits were to hard news. The overwhelming majority of participants' visits were to non-news sites. Although only 1.6% of those visits related to politics, in absolute terms, citizens encounter politics more frequently outside of news than within news. Out of every 10 visits to political content, 3 come from news and 7 from non-news sites. Furthermore, non-news exposure to political content had the same – and in some cases stronger - associations with key democratic attitudes and behaviors as news exposure. These findings offer a comprehensive analysis of the online political (not solely news) ecosystem and demonstrate the importance of assessing the prevalence and effects of political content in non-news sources.

This preregistered project examines the general belief that news has a beneficial impact on society. We test news exposure effects on desirable outcomes, i.e., political knowledge and participation, and detrimental outcomes, i.e., attitude and affective polarization, negative system perceptions, and worsened individual well-being. We rely on two complementary over-time experiments that combine participants' survey self-reports and their behavioral browsing data: one that incentivized participants taking a ‘news vacation’ for a week (N = 797; 30M visits) in the US, the other of 'news binging' for two weeks (N = 828; 17M visits) in Poland. Across both experiments, we demonstrate that reducing or increasing news exposure has little -- if any -- impact on the positive or negative outcomes tested. These robust null effects emerge irrespective of participants' prior levels of news consumption and whether prior news diet was like-minded, and regardless of compliance levels. We argue that these findings reflect the reality of limited news exposure in the real world, with news exposure comprising roughly 3.5\% of citizens' online information diet.

Historical classifications of journalistic traditions are the backbone of comparative explanations for political news coverage. This study assesses the validity of the dominant media systems framework and proposes and tests a novel framework, which states that a history of authoritarianism affects today’s coverage. To facilitate a clean cross-national comparison, we focus on the same person and measurement in 12 Western democracies, that is, the use of the pejorative terms “sexist,” “racist,” “dictator,” and equivalents to describe Donald Trump. Our manually validated automated content analysis (2016–2018; N = 27,830) shows that content varies along with countries’ media and authoritarian history: pejoration is more common in countries with a polarized pluralist media system and former authoritarian countries than elsewhere. Newspapers’ ideology does not matter, irrespective of countries’ level of political parallelism or experiences with authoritarianism. Combined, we provide new methodological and theoretical handles to further comparative communication research in Western democracies.

It has long been speculated that banning parties from participation in elections may be counterproductive because it might provoke societal resistance. Using the European Social Survey (2002–2010; N = 195,405), our study suggests otherwise. We demonstrate that party bans enjoy the legitimacy of majority support. This holds true irrespective of countries’ resilience to extremist influences (or lack thereof) resulting from “institutional intolerance,” electoral entry barriers and authoritarian legacies. Individual orientations toward the democratic establishment do matter to a small extent: citizens with authoritarian tendencies and low system support are less supportive, while this is less so for citizens with extremist ideological orientations. Even though party bans entail significant democratic dilemmas, this study reveals societal resources supportive of repressive responses to extremist parties.