Reading Days

These techniques could also be extended in two directions. First, to assess whether non-political channels also experience echo chamber effects, just along non-political lines. The authors make a comment that r/Music appears to have political echo chambers because of the relationship between music preferences and political ideology, but would we not expect similar echo chambers to appear in cultural subreddits because of preferences for specific genres or products? Second, to attempt to map the distribution of subreddit-level ideology across reddit. If we know which commenters participate in which subreddits, it should be possible to explore the site-wide ideological space and ask whether Reddit is more liberal or conservative.

Pennycook and Rand share the results of a series of surveys and experiments testing hypotheses about the role of analytic thinking on identifying fake news. Pennycook and Rand hypothesize that individuals with higher levels of analytic thinking will be better equipped to reason with the content and sources of fake news and apply reliable schema for reliability. They find evidence confirming this hypothesis under various conditions, including in with and without attribution for headlines and when headlines are partisan in nature. Interestingly, they also show that Trump voters did worse at identifying fake news than Clinton voters. The authors argue from their results that analytic processing overrides motivated reasoning, but that it appears certain ideological groups have lower levels of analytic processing than others. The paper provides a good starting point for thinking about what factors shape one’s susceptibility to fake news. However, important contributions could be made by accounting for prior exposure to fake and real news stories and the effects different candidates have on the performance of their supporters. We can imagine that conservative voters might have performed differently if they were supporting a candidate like Jeb Bush who likely would not have had as antagonistic a relationship with the press and such a positive relationship with false information.

Chong and Druckman provide the empirical assessment of the theory they of competitive framing they introduce in their 2007 JoC paper. They employ experimental conditions in a lab setting to test how competition between frames affects the effects of frames on opinion formation. They find that the strength of a frame is the driving factor in a frame being successful across conditions, with repetition and contrast effects occurring in limited contexts. The work documented is generally solid, but is limited by its lack of an attempt to capture the full complexity of contemporary media and information environments. The number of frames competing is always two, in part to simulate competing messages in an American political campaign, even if that is an idealized vision of political communication. Chong and Druckman also observe that their work does little to generate insights into what makes certain frames stronger than others. Future work in this area would do well to consider more complex theories of the environment frames are situated within.

Chong and Druckman introduce a theory of how framing effects would occur when two elites frames are placed in competition. They identify five potential competitive scenarios (in addition to non-competitive scenarios) and articulate what features should matter and what effect they should have in the different situations. The main contribution is a recognition that traditional framing theory fails to capture the complexities introduced by competition; results in non-competitive situations will likely have different results when a second frame is introduced. However, this theory is still limited by its focus on elite frames, two-party competition, and and limited temporal windows. These conditions may fit a strict political framework, but overlook the potential for competition in the cultural environment at large.

Bartels lays out in this working paper an initial analysis of the state of partisanship about one year into the Trump presidency. He positions his analyses in relation to claims circulated by pundits in the popular press about the unique nature of politics in the current moment. Bartels finds, though, little evidence supporting these claims. Instead, the state of partisanship is largely stable and explainable in very simple ways. Of note, Bartels demonstrates how the differences between the parties can be reduced to two dimensions: scope of government and cultural conservatism. Each party has latched onto and dominates one dimension. The major point of critique is likely to be that the analyses are based on a YouGov panel that may in someway be less than representative. As is, though, a good reminder that politics remains fairly stable.

Kalmoe raises the important question of what effects do language have on the mass public. He demonstrates that violent rhetoric moderated by aggressive personality traits increases one’s support for political violence. These results are found through a series of experiments. Treatment was exposure to a political ad using violent language. Mild language was still used, though, so effects are muted. Kalmoe’s study provides a good starting point for studying the effects of language, but should be pushed beyond the experimental setting which limits how much outside noise can dampen the effects of the specific treatment language. Real cultural and discursive environments may be too noisey for specific language to have meaningful effects.

Parmelee’s article breaks from the usual studies of Twitter I read in that he employs qualitative methods in his analysis. Parmelee interviews political journalists about their uses of Twitter. He finds evidence to suggest that political journalists utilize tweets as information subsidies similar to press releases and that tweets may have an agenda building effect as journalists follow up on and add to content tweeted out by political elites. One important takeaway is the limitation in this work given its age; it is hard to believe that political journalists are still so restrained in their use of tweets given that the President of the United States now uses his personal Twitter account to directly communicate his ideas, positions, and proposals. It may also be worth asking what effects on the mass public such agenda building have and if we can capture the process through computational methods (e.g. Chris Bail’s symbolic boundary approach).

Feezell presents the results of a novel experiment utilizing the Groups feature on Facebook. She recruited subjects to join Facebook groups and then deployed treatment directly through Facebook so that it appeared in the natural stream of subjects’ news feeds. Treatment was hard news stories posted in the Facebook groups; the control was soft news stories. Those who were exposed to treatment (seeing one of the news posts) were more likely to mark a related issue was important at T2 after not indicating so at T1. They also were less likely to perform the inverse and now indicate an issue was not important after thinking it was initially. Feezell’s ultimate argument is that social media can produce an agenda setting affect. This seems like a safe conclusion that fits well within her design and results. The larger contribution is detailing a framework for using Facebook Groups as tools for delivering treatment in online experiments.

Anspach presents the results of an experimental study of the influential effects of friends on news consumption through Facebook. His design improves on that of Messing and Westwood (2012) by allowing subjects to opt out of selecting any news content. It also establishes reasonable ecological validity by replicating the design of Facebook posts and making sure to properly include endorsements and comments from actual Facebook friends through his snowball sampling procedure. Anspach finds that endorsements from friends can overcome partisan bias in news-outlet selection. This study helps to demonstrate the ways in which social media differ from traditional media environments in regards to factors contributing to consumption, but we should remember that the influence of friends has always been a recognized mechanism in promoting consumption, it just used to be offset from the act of consumption itself.

Kalmoe, Gubler, and Wood present a concise set of experimental results suggesting that violent metaphors increase polarization in individuals predisposed to aggression. They argue that political polarization at large may be explained, at least in part, by their results as large segments of the mass public are known to be predisposed to aggression. This conclusion is reasonable given the observed results, but may be undermined by issues of ecological validity. As the authors acknowledge, the survey experiment they administered condensed the window in which treatment was experienced and policy attitudes measured. It should be of value to see if these results replicate in a more authentic cultural environments where opinions will not need to be formed immediately after exposure to violent language and other discursive and cultural content may mute the effects of any specific language.

King, Schneer, and White present the results of a series of 35 experiments on the effect of news media on public expression. Their design involved organizing a set of news organizations to work together and coordinate the publication of stories at random times. The measure of interest was the volume of tweets in the topic area of the stories. The authors find that small-to-medium publications cause about a 19% increase in tweet volume. The study is impressive in its scope and ambition and makes significant process in the study of news media effects. However, the study is certainly limited by the way in which the notion of public expression is operationalized; Twitter is hardly a representation of the public at large and we know from studies of misinformation that information distribution is not balanced across the platform. The authors acknowledge this point, at least in concept, when they consider the potential effect of large publications introducing stories. This work also leaves open the door to ask what practical effect does the introduction of these stories have? What changes beyond an uptick in conversation? What are the pretreatment attitudes of the people taking part in the conversations?

Lelkes and Westwood build on a base of research that identifies and measures affective polarization in the electorate. They contend that these studies fail to consider the asymmetric features of affective polarization. Over five experiments they demonstrate that partisan prejudice is moderated by affective polarization and most commonly occurs in the form of in-group support. They find that there is a clear equality across levels of affective polarization in the willingness to intentionally harm or discriminate against the opposition. These results suggest that political discrimination is a product of in-group favoritism, rather than that of out-group hatred.

Kuklinski, Cobb, and Gilens designed a survey experiment to test the strength and source of attitudes towards affirmative action policies. Their method of choice was predominantly list experiments, in which they offer the control group a list of choices and ask how many make them angry. The treatment group then receives the same list plus one additional option. By comparing the average number of choices, one can estimate the attitudes towards the additional item in the treatment for both top-level groups, as well as subgroups. This particular advantage is well demonstrated through subgroup analyses of southern and non-southern whites.

In this article, Bail introduces a theory about how organizations can promote public discussion about a contentious topic. He suggests that if we construct cultural networks based on the topics of discussion, organizations that can insert themselves between discussion groups will generate more activity. To identify discursive groups, he identifies shared keywords, weighted by the tf-idf values for each term, and maps the corresponding network. He finds that those organizations that have a high betweenness in this network also generate more substantial comments. The applications for this framework are broad, as Bail recommends applying it to study the evolution of political parties and artistic movements. We might also consider its usefulness in studying the evolution of discourse on platforms more broadly.

Bail uses the case of symbolic constructions of immigrants in Europe to demonstrate that symbolic boundaries vary spatially and that traditional social psychology perspectives of in- and out-groups cannot capture this complexity. Bail makes sure to demonstrate how symbolic boundaries are linked to social boundaries and policy decisions, opening the door for further connections about the links to politics and opinion. After detailing the post-WWII history of European immigration, Bail shows how the use of fuzzy cluster analysis on a multidimensional survey item provides more informative cluster identifications than a comparable crisp clustering.

Sovey and Green provide a helpful survey of the theory and application history of instrumental variables. They open with an explanation of the mathematical framework behind the estimation of instrumental variables, emphasizing two different perspectives: structural econometric modeling and potential outcomes. They then exemplify the application of instrumental variables by documenting how an IV analysis of Albertson and Lawrence’s (2009) study of the effects of viewing a Fox News special would be conducted. They then cover the issue of how instruments are justified and identified by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses in these practices across the political science literature since the 1980s. They then offer two more cases that provide useful examples of how to question and validate instruments. The conclude by sharing a 6-item guide for readers encountering instrumental variables in studies: Ask what is estimated, consider the independence of the instrumental variable and the potential outcomes, question the validity of the exclusion restriction, question whether the instrument is weak, evaluate the monotonicity assumption, and assess the possibility of spillover effects.

Bail proposes a novel approach to studying the ways in which public discourse about a specific topic changes over time. His approach involves a robust sampling of civil society organizations and their press releases, as well as the articles and transcripts from a selection of representative news media institutions from 2001-2008 all on the topic of Islam and Muslims. In order to develop a measure of influence, Bail used plagiarism detection software to measure the average number of similar words between press releases and news content. He then regressed these values on a set of predictors including distance in discursive space, as estimated by the Euclidean distance of institutions and press releases in a 5-topic space. He found that fringe groups benefited from using emotions like fear and anger, while more mainstream groups benefited from the use of their own capital. When put in the context of an evolutionary model of discourse, Bail finds that over time these influences contributed to the mainstreaming of fringe groups, which in turn affected the discursive field, creating new opportunities for and necessitating new strategies from all of the organizations and media institutions.This paper has clear applications to more general online discourse on platforms like Twitter and offers a methodology for a complex analysis of the flow and evolution of discourse over levels of communication.