Does Partisan Media Increase Political Participation?

News consumers have more choices than ever when deciding how to keep up with politics. Network and cable news now compete with blogs and social media to attract discerning viewers to their reporting. While this fragmentation of news media sources has expanded consumer choice, it has also allowed partisans to retreat to news sources that align with their political views. This shift towards increasingly niche and partisan news sources has been much maligned by political scientists, many of whom believe it exacerbates polarization and makes us less willing to consider opposing viewpoints. However, despite these alleged drawbacks, the prevalence of partisan media has a potential upside: it may increase political engagement. 

Political engagement is one area in which partisan news might produce positive results for democracy. A politically involved populus provides a critical check on state overreach and helps ensure that politicians are held accountable for their poor decisions and corrupt behavior. Partisan news tends to ignite strong emotions in its audience and reinforces their existing opinions, ultimately leading to an angry self-assured audience that is very interested in politics. This type of person might be more likely to vote, volunteer for a campaign, or tell their friends about their political views. But does this proposed relationship between partisan news and participation happen in practice? Does increased participation offset all the supposed negative effects of partisan news?

In this case study you will use data from the DemCap Analytics tool (DCA) to evaluate whether partisan media benefits or harms democracy. You will consider its effects on political engagement, ideological polarization, and deliberative democracy to gauge whether we are better off with or without partisan news.

Brian Meeks, a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, defines partisan news as “news organizations from the political right and left that explicitly promote partisan viewpoints or whose coverage tends to lean toward conservative or liberal frames.”

A source is partisan when it routinely presents stories and inserts opinions that favor one political party over the other(s), often with the unspoken intent of affecting public opinion on political issues. Partisan news uses more simple, confrontational, and negative language, which makes them easier to understand and less nuanced than non-partisan and mainstream outlets. Because of this, many casual political news consumers find this type of content easier to digest than coverage from more traditional news outlets. This is reflected in news viewership patterns, as 1 in 7 Americans watch more than 8 hours of partisan news a month, and most of these viewers have weak prior attitudes and don’t consume cross-cutting partisan media (i.e. partisan media from the other party) or broadcast media.

It’s clear that partisan media is an important part of many Americans’ news diets, but how does it affect their political behavior? Partisan journalism routinely presents the news in a biased light and withholds crucial perspectives from its audience that would give them a more complete view of current events. Indeed, when Fox News viewers were incentivized to watch CNN for a month, they reported that Fox had concealed negative information about President Trump that affected their political attitudes. Democracies are enriched when voters frequently expose themselves to ideas they disagree with, as it requires them to reconsider their prior opinions and craft stronger arguments in favor of their policy preferences. If partisan news limits the extent to which its viewers have to engage with competing ideas, then it is preventing us from living up to America’s deliberative democratic ideals.

Additionally, partisan news networks can contribute to mass polarization by nudging its viewers to ideological extremes. One-sided presentation of policy issues can cause viewers to adopt extreme positions, since they are deprived of countervailing information that might moderate their stances. Indeed, the University of Kansas’ Benjamin Warner finds that when conservatives were exposed to homogenous and highly conservative media content about Iranian relations, they developed much more extreme interventionist foreign policy attitudes. Similarly, Matthew Levendusky finds that when viewers are exposed to ideologically like-minded news they are significantly more likely to express strong agreement with extreme policy attitudes. Though Levendusky notes that avid political news consumers only constitute a small part of the electorate, they are among the most politically engaged voters, so their views have an outsized influence on the kinds of policies governments pass. Collectively, all of these drawbacks are cause for concern about the democratic implications of partisan news.

Despite the drawbacks of partisan news mentioned in the preceding section, some political scientists contend that it may not be entirely bad for democracy because it bolsters democratic participation. Viewers who frequently watch partisan news programs will receive a steady stream of information reinforcing their preexisting attitudes and stoking their anger about the wrongheadedness of those who disagree with them. Ultimately,pro-attitudinal (i.e. consistent with the viewer’s ideology, party, or values) partisan news creates an audience of ideologues who are very confident that their political views are correct. Such an audience of angry self-assured politicos might be more likely to engage in political activities like voting, volunteering for a political campaign, or donating to a cause.

Political scientists find some support for this perspective. Magdalena Wojcieszak and colleagues conducted a survey experiment in which respondents were randomly assigned to read either a balanced, pro-attitudinal, or counter-attitudinal news article about a policy issue. They were then asked to rate their likelihood of engaging in seven distinct political activities, including “taking part in a protest or demonstration” and “contacting a public official or political party”. The results show that respondents who viewed the pro-attitudinal news stories were significantly more likely to report a desire to participate in one of the seven political activities than were viewers of balanced and counter-attitudinal stories. Many political scientists have expressed concern that if the public is apathetic and poorly-informed that they “cannot provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the maintenance of democratic procedures.” If partisan news helps create more engaged and participatory voters, then it could contribute to stronger institutions, greater accountability, and more robust democratic norms. The questions detailed below will require you to determine whether these hypothesized benefits of partisan news outweigh its drawbacks.