We show that the demand for news varies with the perceived affinity of the news organization to the consumer’s political preferences. In an experimental setting, conservatives and Republicans preferred to read news reports attributed to Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR. Democrats and liberals exhibited exactly the opposite syndrome—dividing their attention equally between CNN and NPR, but avoiding Fox News. This pattern of selective exposure based on partisan affinity held not only for news coverage of controversial issues but also for relatively “soft” subjects such as crime and travel. The tendency to select news based on anticipated agreement was also strengthened among more politically engaged partisans. Overall, these results suggest that the further proliferation of new media and enhanced media choices may contribute to the further polarization of the news audience.

Reports on the state of the horserace and analysis of the candidates' strategies are pervasive themes in news coverage of campaigns. Various explanations have been suggested for the dominance of strategy-oriented over hard news. The most frequently identified factors are the length of the modern campaign, the built-in conflict between journalists and campaign operatives, and the pressures of the marketplace. This paper provides a test of the market hypothesis. Given access to a wide variety of news reports about the presidential campaign in the weeks immediately preceding the 2000 election, we find that voters were drawn to reports on the horserace and strategy. Strategy reports proved far more popular than reports about the issues. Although media organizations stand to profit, the overproduction of horserace news takes a toll on the political commons. Our results indicate that exposure to this genre of campaign news contributed to increased cynicism about the candidates and the electoral process itself.

This article explores two hypotheses about how voters encounter information during campaigns. According to the anticipated agreement hypothesis, people prefer to hear about candidates with whom they expect to agree. The ''issue publics'' hypothesis posits that voters choose to encounter information on issues they consider most important personally. We tested both hypotheses by distributing a multimedia CD offering extensive information about George W. Bush and Al Gore to a representative sample of registered voters with personal computers and home Internet connections during the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign. Exposure to information was measured by tracking individuals' use of the CD. The evidence provided strong support for the issue public hypothesis and partial support for the anticipated agreement hypothesis. Republicans and conservatives preferred to access information about George Bush, but Democrats and liberals did not prefer information about Vice President Gore. No interactions appeared between these two forms of selective exposure. We designed this study to explore individual differences in exposure to campaign information. Monitoring the information choices of a large sample of voters over the course of a campaign is a challenging task. We used a relatively new form of campaign communication (a multimedia CD-Rom), which made it possible to track the information voters saw fit to encounter. By providing real voters with real information about real candidates in the context of a significant election (the 2000 presidential election), our research design permitted us to test a pair of long-standing hypotheses (1) the ''anticipated agreement'' hypothesis-people seek out information about candidates with whom they expect to agree and avoid information about candidates with whom they expect to disagree; and (2) the ''issue public hypothesis''-people seek out information on policy issues to which they attach a great deal of personal importance.We begin by reviewing the literature on voluntary exposure to political information and outlining the theoretical rationale for the hypotheses. Next, we describe our methodology, outline the findings, and spell out their implications for understanding voter behavior and campaign communication more generally.

A BSTRACT We propose a context-dependent approach to the study of political information. Combining a content analysis of broadcast news with a national survey measuring public awareness of various events, issues, and individuals in the newsAs Walter Lippmann (1922) pointed out in his classic account of public opinion, politics is inherently a mediated experience. Indeed, issues and events not covered by the media fail to enter into the political consciousness. Yet, despite the indispensable role of the news media as "windows on the world", most scholarship on political information has focused on individual-level explanations (Bennett, 2006;Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996;Luskin, 1987).Conventional theories of political knowledge have relied on individual attributes (such as educational attainment) as the principal causal variable across a broad spectrum of awareness ranging from textbook knowledge of civics to familiarity with current events and issues (see Schudson, 1998). Thus, the standard predictors of political knowledge -no matter how the concept is defined -have been political interest, media attentiveness, education and other equivalent indicators of political motivation (Price & Zaller, 1993 We propose an alternative, more context-dependent approach to the study of political information. More specifically, we suggest that the importance of individual-level motivational factors varies across contexts; they are less important in information-rich environments, but critical in information-deprived situations.2

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Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.The explosive rise in immigration worldwide over the last two decades has led to significant changes in the demographic composition of many developed countries. The political consequences of these shifts are profound, including the formation and electoral success of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe, the passage of the UK's referendum to leave the European Union, and now President Trump's drive to dramatically tighten US immigration policy after his election in 2016. Debates about threats posed by immigrants have become a regular feature of election campaigns, and were especially prominent in the 2016 US and 2017 Dutch elections. Then, as for many years before, political rhetoric about the issue was rife with cues highlighting both cultural differences between natives and newcomers, and the potentially negative economic consequences of increasing immigration. The causal antecedents of mass opinion about immigration have received some careful attention, but comprehensive, comparative analyses are still rare, and most such attempts are survey-based correlational studies rather than experiments that can isolate specific causal mechanisms. One core debate focuses on the economic versus ethno-cultural drivers of opposition to new immigrants in advanced industrial nations. In this article, we present results from the largest systematic, cross-national and controlled experimental study of these explanations to date.

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