The Minimal Effects of Conflict News Frames on Political Engagement

• In Event: Framing Effects in the News

Abstract

Political science research frequently portrays citizens as politically disengaged. An important question is how to mobilize citizens to engage politically through formal means (e.g., voting), but also informally through, for example, political discussion and deliberation. One way engagement might be encouraged is through the portrayal of political conflict in the news media. We test this possibility using a novel survey experiment embedded in a long-running survey panel (n=1,227). We randomly exposed participants to a substantive and non-substantive conflict between political parties and measured their willingness to perform a set of issue-specific political engagement activities across four distinct high- and low-salience issues. Our results suggest that while citizens perceive differences in the levels of conflict between news portrayals, there is, however, essentially no mobilizing effect of exposure to such conflict, not even when we accounted for individuals’ level of orientation towards conflict. While this can be read as a normatively undesirable result in that news fail to mobilize citizens, it also shows that citizens resist being activated by mere ‘game frame’ representations of politics (e.g. non-substantive conflict) that are typically seen as potentially deleterious. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for journalistic practice, political engagement, and for normative questions of citizens’ role in contemporary democracy.

Authors

• Camilla Bjarnøe, University of Southern Denmark

• Thomas J. Leeper, London School of Economics and Political Science