Intramedia Moderation, Electoral Ambivalence, and Electoral Decision Making

Mobile communication and cross-cutting discussion: A cross-national study of South Korea and the US

“…While admitting that a specific media use would be less likely to stand alone in an age of multiple communication channels, studies of conventional media have aptly highlighted that various news sources could function in cooperation with one another to influence citizens' attitudes and behaviors (Balmas, 2014;Hmielowski, 2012;Holbert and Benoit, 2009). Drawing on a similar argument, Lee et al (2014) recently showed the significant interaction between distinct mobile practices in predicting boosted political participation.…”

“Maybe Yes, Maybe No?”: Testing the Indirect Relationship of News Use through Ambivalence and Strength of Policy Position on Public Engagement with Climate Change

“…Some scholars point to results-showing that ambivalence leads people to engage in systematic processing of information (Bromer, 1998) and to rely less on heuristics such as party identification when making decisions (Basinger & Lavine, 2005)-as evidence that ambivalence is a characteristic of an ideal citizenry. However, findings-showing that ambivalence causes people to delay decisions (Hmielowski, 2012), leads to inconsistences between their attitudes and the policies and politicians that they support (Fournier, 2005), and weakens the relationship between attitudes and behaviors (Castro et al, 2009)-suggest ambivalence may be an indicator of a confused citizenry. The results of this study show higher ambivalence is associated with holding a weaker policy position, and reduced intention to act suggests that holding opposing attitudes is more characteristic of a confused citizenry.…”

“…By contrast, today's studies have examined the external communication environment as a source of cross-pressures. In this reexamination of the cross-pressures hypothesis, scholars have looked at communication sources such as interpersonal communication (Mutz, 2006), news content (Hmielowski, 2012), and political advertising (Keele & Wolak, 2008). This line of inquiry has focused on examining the extent to which use of supportive and opposing information is associated with outcome variables such as vote time decision (Matthes, 2012) and levels of political engagement (Dilliplane, 2011).…”

“…Scholars have added to the cross-pressures hypothesis by proposing that ambivalence could serve as a mediating variable between information use and measures of engagement (Hmielowski, 2012;Mutz, 2006). For example, Mutz (2006) showed evidence that ambivalence could serve as a mediating variable between information use and political engagement.…”

Rush, Rachel, and Rx: Modeling Partisan Media's Influence on Structural Knowledge of Healthcare Policy

“…Although interpersonal networks are not the same as mass media, the process functions in a similar way. In essence, people can choose to talk to those who hold similar or opposing views much like people can choose to view programing that reinforces or challenges existing attitudes (Hmielowski, 2012). Based on these studies, we propose the following hypotheses: H1: Paying attention to conservative programming will decrease ambivalence among conservatives and increase ambivalence among liberals (path W 1 ).…”