Historical Dramas, Current Political Choices: Analyzing Partisan Selective Exposure With a Docudrama

Abstract

This study investigates the docudrama hypothesis-the idea that fiction based on real stories can influence audience members' perception of political reality-in the context of current debates on partisan selective exposure and reinforcement effects. It does so by analyzing the influence of an Oscarnominated docudrama on viewers' attitudes and behavioral intention using propensity score matching. By means of a representative survey, we find strong evidence of partisan selective exposure and avoidance. Furthermore, among respondents with a similar likelihood of film attendance, actual attendance has a strong association with positive retrospective evaluations of the political coalition glorified in the movie, and an indirect relationship-via retrospective evaluations-with voting intentions. Discussion of the findings shed light into potential real-world political effects of partisan selective exposure using content other than news.

An inconvenient source? Attributes of science documentaries and their effects on information-related behavioral intentions

“…Though a large body of scholarship exists around the cultivation effects of television viewing [Gerbner et al, 1982; for examples of scholarship on cultivation effects, see Mutz and Nir, 2010;Stroud, 2007;Valenzuela and Brandão, 2015], for documentaries aimed at public engagement such as An Inconvenient Truth, it is worth asking about their effects. While the impacts and mechanisms of narrative persuasion in entertainment media are widely studied using models such as the extended-elaboration likelihood [Slater and Rouner, 2002;Slater, Rouner and Long, 2006] and entertainment overcoming resistance models [Moyer-Gusé, 2008;Moyer-Gusé, Jain and Chung, 2012;Moyer-Gusé and Nabi, 2010], investigations of the potential media effects of documentary feature films are scant and there is an even greater paucity with regard to science documentaries.…”