Is News to Blame? The Effects of "News Vacation" on Affective Polarization

• In Event: The Great Divide: Information, Communication, and Polarization

Abstract

Scholars accept that democracies function best when citizens are up-to-date on political events and knowledgeable about the issues of the day (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). News exposure has been seen as normatively beneficial (as reflected, for instance, in social desirability bias leading to overreporting of news exposure in surveys; Prior, 2009). Yet, the current media environment allows for unprecedented levels of exposure to like-minded news sources, which may be to blame for reinforcing people's political attitudes (Levendusky, 2013) and for growing affective polarization (Garrett et al., 2014). We problematize the notion that news exposure is inherently desirable and, in so doing, we offer a novel take on the problem of polarization. We propose that decreasing people’s news exposure in general - even after accounting for the potential simultaneous decreases in like-minded exposure – will attenuate both attitude and affective polarization. We also suspect that it will improve people’s perceptions of the political system, enhancing support for compromise and also lowering perceived polarization and attribution to negative intentions to the outparty. In addition to these positive effects, we examine two democratically negative consequences of “news vacation,” i.e., decreased political knowledge and participatory intentions, and also explore its effects on an under-studied factor, individual well-being (both in terms of happiness or life satisfaction as well as of engaging in destructive behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, yelling at others, etc.).

The pre-registered experiment was embedded in wave 3 of a 3-wave/9-month panel survey that uses both survey and web browsing data. 1,025 people were invited to participate. After wave 3, pre-treatment survey and browsing data submission, we randomly assigned 60% of the participants to go on “news vacation” (i.e., $10 incentive to stop following the news for one-week and take 2 short, 2-question, surveys checking compliance and reminding of the task) and 40% to a control group (i.e., no instructions). At the end of the week, both groups completed the post-treatment survey and shared their web browsing history.

We disentangle the effects of decreasing news exposure in general from the effects of decreasing like-minded exposure, while also testing whether these effects depend on people’s prior levels of news consumption and the intensity of their political predispositions. Preliminary results indicate that, in general and in the aggregate, the “news vacation” did not necessarily moderate individual attitudes nor affective polarization towards a range of political outgroups. We do, however, find some heterogeneous effects depending on party, party identity, and ideology strength. Weak partisans moderated their views (i.e., held weaker views on particular policy topics after the news vacation). Moreover, after not consuming news for a week, strong ideologues perceived the political system as less polarized and their well-being also improved (i.e., they felt less anxious and depressed and also happier, more satisfied with their life, and more optimistic about their future).

Authors

• Magdalena Wojcieszak, UC Davis, U of Amsterdam

• Andreu Casas, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Ericka Menchen-Trevino, American University

• Miriam Boon