Determinants of Science Communication: How Politicization Affects Scientist Media Engagement

• In Event: Media and Misinformation

Abstract

As scientific issues become increasingly entangled with partisan conflict and value contestation, scientists face growing political pressures that may discourage their participation in public communication. Existing research has primarily explained scientists' media engagement through professional motivations, communication skills, and institutional support, leaving the political environment as an institutional constraint largely underexplored (Besley et al., 2018; Marcinkowski & Kohring, 2014). This study examines how scientists' political concerns shape their media interview participation and through what mechanisms this relationship operates.Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) and Media Substitution Theory (Dimmick et al., 2000), this study proposes that political concerns suppress media participation through two pathways. The first is a psychological pathway, in which political concerns reduce participation indirectly by undermining scientists' confidence in completing media interviews. The second is a channel substitution pathway, in which scientists shift toward scholar-led platforms and away from mainstream media. The study uses data from a national survey of U.S. scientists conducted in early 2021 by Arizona State University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (N = 334), covering four fields: biology, civil engineering, geography, and public health. Hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling (SEM), and a multigroup analysis comparing applied and basic science disciplines is conducted.Results show that political concerns have a significant direct negative effect on media interview participation. The psychological pathway receives robust support and holds consistently across applied and basic science disciplines. However, the channel substitution pathway is not supported. Rather than strategically redirecting their communication efforts toward scholar-led platforms, scientists experiencing stronger political concerns tend to withdraw from public communication more broadly across all channels.Theoretically, this study advances science communication research by moving the political environment from a background condition into a testable institutional constraint, opening a more systematic line of inquiry into how macro-level political conditions shape individual communication behavior. It also refines the application of the Theory of Planned Behavior in politicized settings, showing that perceived behavioral control is the mechanism through which political pressure translates into behavioral withdrawal.The non-significant substitution pathway further challenges the applicability of Media Substitution Theory in politicized communication contexts. Rather than triggering a rational reallocation of effort across channels, political concerns appear to suppress scientists' perceived value of public communication across all channels simultaneously, suggesting that pervasive environmental pressure forecloses the comparative channel evaluation that substitution logic requires. Practically, the findings highlight that systematic media communication training and institutional risk protection are critical intervention points for sustaining scientists' public engagement, particularly as political pressures risk producing a systematic absence of scientific voices in public discourse.

Author

• Rong Zuo, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author