Reciprocal relations between populist radical-right attitudes and political information behavior: A longitudinal study of attitude development in high-choice information environments.
Final Report Abstract
Our project sought to measure implicit and explicit populist radical-right (PRR) attitudes, and to analyze how widely they aredistributed among the population. Once the structure of PRR attitudes was established, the second goal of our project was to understand how such attitudes and their variants related to political information behavior. To tackle these research questions, we combined survey data with tests of implicit associations and a tracking of people’s online information usage, employing a systematic content analysis of the tracked information diets. For Switzerland, we conducted a three-wave panel survey and a twowave tracking study allowing us to trace the development of PRR attitudes and to differentiate effects of different degrees of political contestation. To get insights into the role of country-specific variables such as social (un-)desirability and the strength of PRR voices, we compared the Swiss data with two waves of survey and one media usage tracking in Germany. Our results have confirmed that PRR attitudes are indeed composed of three unique but correlated components –populism, nativism, and authoritarianism–, and that such three-dimensional structure is reproduced both at the level of explicit and implicit attitudes and reproduced both for Germany and Switzerland. Further, we proposed that some degree of implicit-explicit incongruence of PRR attitudes is psychologically meaningful, in that the social undesirability of PRR attitudes in certain contexts would make this relationship stronger in some cases (i.e., explicit and implicit attitudes are both ‘pronounced’) and weaker in others (i.e., explicit PRR attitudes are ‘discrepant’ from implicit ones). Different from what we expected, the difference between implicit and explicit PRR attitudes was not found to be greater in Germany, where it is socially undesirable to express PRR ideas, than in Switzerland where it is not. Looking at the interplay between PRR attitudes and political information behavior, we found that PRR attitudes related to overall lower levels of political involvement and this in turn led to lower exposure to political information online. The German data also revealed that PRR attitudes related to greater consumption of PRR political contents, confirming our expectation that these attitudes would drive attitude-consistent information consumption. Despite limitations arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, our project was able to develop in new directions. First, we inquired directly into the effects of the pandemic on (political) attitudes, demonstrating among others how the consumption of news media narrowly relates to political trust in times of crises. Second, we explored participants’ routes to access news when online, shedding valuable novel insights into multiple consumption modes. Third, in a period particularly flooded with disinformation and conspiracies as the pandemic, we revealed among others that individuals holding strong PRR attitudes were likely to encounter disinformation online. Finally, in methodoriented papers we assessed novel research challenges such as participation reactance in tracking research and automated content classification of large volumes of tracked data. In all, our project speaks to the relevance of attending to media consumption and effects phenomena with comprehensive methodological approaches capturing citizens’ perceptions and attitudes but also behavioral data.
Publications
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Automated Tracking Approaches for Studying Online Media Use: A Critical Review and Recommendations. Communication Methods and Measures, 16(2), 79-95.
Christner, Clara; Urman, Aleksandra; Adam, Silke & Maier, Michaela
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To track or not to track: examining perceptions of online tracking for information behavior research. Internet Research, 32(7), 260-279.
Makhortykh, Mykola; Urman, Aleksandra; Gil-Lopez, Teresa & Ulloa, Roberto
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Implicit and explicit populist and anti-immigrant attitudes and their explanatory power for populist radical-right party support. Acta Politica, 58(3), 591-613.
Maier, Michaela; Welzenbach-Vogel, Ines C.; Christner, Clara; Tillman, Erik R.; Zinkernagel, Axel & Schmitt, Manfred
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Media Trust and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis of Short-Term Trust Changes, Their Ideological Drivers and Consequences in Switzerland. Communication Research, 50(2), 205-229.
Adam, Silke; Urman, Aleksandra; Arlt, Dorothee; Gil-Lopez, Teresa; Makhortykh, Mykola & Maier, Michaela
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News, Threats, and Trust: How COVID-19 News Shaped Political Trust, and How Threat Perceptions Conditioned This Relationship. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 28(4), 952-974.
de León, Ernesto; Makhortykh, Mykola; Gil-Lopez, Teresa; Urman, Aleksandra & Adam, Silke
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Do (Not!) Track Me: Relationship Between Willingness to Participate and Sample Composition in Online Information Behavior Tracking Research. Social Science Computer Review, 41(6), 2274-2292.
Gil-López, Teresa; Christner, Clara; de León, Ernesto; Makhortykh, Mykola; Urman, Aleksandra; Maier, Michaela & Adam, Silke
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On Issue Survival: News Media and How Political Issues Remain Salient in the Face of Crisis. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 35(3).
de León, Ernesto
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The Interplay Between Explicit and Implicit Right‐Wing Populism in Germany and Switzerland. Political Psychology, 44(6), 1235-1258.
Maier, Michaela; Gil‐López, Teresa; Bromme, Laurits; Zinkernagel, Axel; Welzenbach‐Vogel, Ines C.; Christner, Clara; Adam, Silke; Schmitt, Manfred & Tillman, Erik R.
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You are how (and where) you search? Comparative analysis of web search behavior using web tracking data. Journal of Computational Social Science, 6(2), 741-756.
Urman, Aleksandra & Makhortykh, Mykola
