As a result of the rise of online communication and political divisions based on symbols, rather than structure (decrease in the importance of class-based voting), citizens are increasingly linked to news outlets that articulate and reinforce their views. The process is facilitated by the spontaneous processes of bottom–up communication that excludes, in an iterative process, people who express views that are inconsistent with the prevailing opinion. The emergence of “information verticals” is a significant influence on attitudes to some issues covered in political debate. These effects operate with regard to so-called easy issues, that is, those rooted in emotions and in the symbolic sphere. Our article is an empirical test of our hypotheses about the effects of media framing of “hard” and “easy” issues. We apply a survey experiment method to verify whether contact with news coverage has an effect on attitudes, taking into account the political orientation and cognitive skills of citizens. Our empirical analyses confirm that a hostile media framing of migration changes respondents’ attitudes no matter their level of cognitive engagement. The data come from Poland.
a b s t r a c tAmong the wide range of theories explaining why some people vote and others do not, one is recently gaining particular popularity. This is the theory of voting as a habit (e.g. Plutzer, 2002;Franklin, 2004;Hooghe, 2004). The empirical evidence supporting this theory covers only Western democracies, so the following question might be asked: is this pattern universal? In the case of old democracies, voting is a habit acquired gradually in a process which starts at the moment of the very first election one can cast the ballot. In new democracies the situation is different, as we can pinpoint the starting moment (first democratic election), which is the same for different voters and thus different age cohorts. In this paper we investigate voting as a habit in new democracies, using data from the Polish National Election Study. We find that voting in Poland has some habitual aspect; repeated voting brings about a (sort of) habit, which has an intrinsic, irreducible effect on voter turnout. We also find that habit of voting is formed likewise in all age cohorts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.