TY - JOUR
T1 - Political Participation and Ideological News Online
T2 - "Differential Gains" and "Differential Losses" in a Presidential Election Cycle
AU - Brundidge, Jennifer
AU - Garrett, R. Kelly
AU - Rojas, Hernando
AU - Gil de Zúñiga, Homero
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (SES 0121232). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions reflected in the material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation. We thank Jim Danziger and the POINT project for support of this work.
PY - 2014/7
Y1 - 2014/7
N2 - Observations of the contemporary news media environment often revolve around the topics of ideological polarization and blurred boundaries between mass and interpersonal communication. This study explores these topics through a focus on the association between ideologically oriented online news use, commenting on online news, and political participation. We hypothesize that both ideological online news use generally and proattitudinal online news use are positively related to political participation and that online news commenting creates "differential gains" by augmenting these relationships. Yet we also hypothesize that counterattitudinal online news use is negatively related to political participation and that online news commenting creates "differential losses" by exacerbating this relationship. Analyses of two independently collected and nationally representative surveys found that frequent ideological online news use, proattitudinal online news use, and commenting are all positively related to political participation. We found no evidence for differential gains as a result of online commenting but only for differential losses-counterattitudinal online news use interacts with commenting to create a negative relationship with political participation.
AB - Observations of the contemporary news media environment often revolve around the topics of ideological polarization and blurred boundaries between mass and interpersonal communication. This study explores these topics through a focus on the association between ideologically oriented online news use, commenting on online news, and political participation. We hypothesize that both ideological online news use generally and proattitudinal online news use are positively related to political participation and that online news commenting creates "differential gains" by augmenting these relationships. Yet we also hypothesize that counterattitudinal online news use is negatively related to political participation and that online news commenting creates "differential losses" by exacerbating this relationship. Analyses of two independently collected and nationally representative surveys found that frequent ideological online news use, proattitudinal online news use, and commenting are all positively related to political participation. We found no evidence for differential gains as a result of online commenting but only for differential losses-counterattitudinal online news use interacts with commenting to create a negative relationship with political participation.
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U2 - 10.1080/15205436.2013.821492
DO - 10.1080/15205436.2013.821492
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84904269557
SN - 1520-5436
VL - 17
SP - 464
EP - 486
JO - Mass Communication and Society
JF - Mass Communication and Society
IS - 4
ER -