Selective exposure in different political information environments – How media fragmentation and polarization shape congruent news use

Abstract

Previous research posits that individual predispositions play an essential role in explaining patterns of selective exposure to political information. Yet the contextual factors in the political information environment have received far less attention. Using a cross-national and quasi-experimental design, this article is one of the first to investigate how political information environments shape selective exposure. We rely on a unique two-wave online survey quasi-experiment in five countries (Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Poland and the United States) with 4349 participants to test the propositions that (a) the level of polarization and fragmentation in information environments and (b) the type of media source used affect selective exposure. Our results reveal that selective exposure is slightly more frequent among regular social media users but is less common among users of TV, radio and newspapers; crucially, it is more common in information environments that are highly fragmented and polarized. Nevertheless, news users from less fragmented-polarized media landscapes show one surprising yet intriguing behaviour: in a quasi-experimentally manipulated setting with more opportunities to self-select than they may be accustomed to, their coping strategy is to pick larger amounts of congruent news stories. All our findings imply that contextual factors play a crucial role in moderating individuals’ tendency to select information that aligns with their political views.

Questions of Communicative Change and Continuity

“…Fletcher and Nielsen (2017) found the UK to have a more fragmented audience than Denmark, Germa ny, France, Spain, and the US, and Denmark to have a more fragmented audience than Spain and the US. In countries with a higher degree of fragmentation, a higher selective exposure is found (Steppat et al, 2022).…”

“…Another question is whether the development of high-choice media en vironments leads to a fragmentation of media users. Here, little overall fragmentation of recipients is shown for offline and online media, and therefore, it is not possible to speak of audience fragmentation (or echo chambers) (Fletcher & Nielsen, 2017;Steppat et al, 2022). However, there are, again, differences between media systems.…”

“…About half of the data sources used are existing sources such as the European Social Survey, the European Election Survey, or the Reuters Institute Digital News Report. A number of studies additio nally or exclusively use self-collected data, and some use combinations of surveys and content analyses as well as experimental designs (Steppat et al, 2022) and web-tracking data (Stier et al, 2020). The studies examine the relationship between media system structures and media use as well as media effects at different levels and include the following categories: 1.Studies that look at media use and/or media effects in a comparative perspective, examining in general differences between certain countries; 2.Studies that make comparisons between countries in terms of specific characteristics and classify country similarities and differences; and 3.Studies that include the media system in their statistical explanatory models for selected phenomena (i.e., country as a variable) and show explicitly the explained variance contributed by the media system.…”

Educación contra el prejuicio: caso aplicado al Periodismo

“…Este fenómeno debe relacionarse con el denominado "sesgo de selección", según el cual los ciudadanos tienden a elegir medios y noticias que confirman sus opiniones o preferencias previas (Barnidge et al, 2020;Ling, 2020). A esa misma conducta apunta la teoría de la "exposición selectiva" (Steppat et al, 2021;Stroud, 2017). Además, los prejuicios introducen sesgos en la selección y redacción de noticias, en ocasiones de manera involuntaria o inconsciente (Hackett, 1984).…”

#RumorsCOVID-19: Predicting the Forwarding of Online Rumors in Wuhan, China and in Israel

“…Other studies focused on the role of users’ ability to acquire information from diverse channels in silencing rumors (Chua and Banerjee, 2017; Mason et al, 2011). Furthermore, Steppat, Castro, and Esser (2021) found that users from countries with more inclusive political information environments are the least likely to engage in selective exposure in their daily news use. They also found that selective exposure is slightly more frequent among regular social media users than other media.…”