Authoritarian Personality, Partisan Media Selective Exposure, and Gun Attitudes

• In Event: Poster Session: New Research in Information Technology and Politics & Canadian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: New Research in Information Technology & Politics

Abstract

People with strong authoritarian personality have high demand for safety, and are more likely to oppose gun control (Altemeyer, R. A., 1996). The authoritarian personality is strongly connected with conservative beliefs (Napier & Jost, 2008; Bakker et al., 2021), which we believe may lead to partisan media selective exposure. Although there is a bitter controversy over the effects of partisan media selective exposure, Levendusky (2013) believes that citizens store the summary attitude from the partisan media they watch to update their beliefs. After people’s exposure to partisan media, which holds opposite gun attitudes, they may store these attitudes, and express their support or opposition for gun control. Therefore, we propose that partisan media selective exposure serves as a mediator between authoritarian personality and gun control attitudes. To test our hypotheses, this study uses ANES 2020 data (N=8,280). This study is also the first to classify more than 60 mainstream media listed in ANES 2016 & 2020 into partisan media. This study uses Stata 17 and medsem package (Mehmetoglu, 2018) to analyze the mediation model. Based on classification of mediation models proposed by Zhao et al. (2010), the findings show that 1) With liberal media selective exposure as the mediator, the model is an indirect-only mediation model (full mediation). About 45 % of the effects of authoritarian personality on gun control attitudes are mediated by liberal-leaning media use; 2) With conservative media selective exposure as the mediator, the model is a competitive mediation model (partial mediation), revealing that there may be some omitted mediators. About 22 % of the effects of authoritarian personality on gun control attitudes are mediated by conservative-leaning media use. Surprisingly, using ANES 2020 data, authoritarian personality is negatively associated with conservative media selective exposure, while authoritarian personality is indeed negatively associated with liberal media selective exposure. What’s more, ANES 2016 & 2020 panel data (N=2,670) shows that 1) overall, conservative media selective exposure decreases respondents’ gun control attitudes; 2) For Democrats, exposure to counter-attitudinal news leads to decline in gun control attitudes (the conversion effect); For Republicans, exposure to like-minded news also leads to decline in gun control attitudes (the reinforcement effect). Our work contributes to extending current literature. Firstly, our study tests that whether authoritarian personality affects the behavior of partisan media choice. Secondly, our study builds bridges among political personality, partisan media selective exposure and specific policy preferences, by explaining the mechanism through which the authoritarian personality can affect gun control attitudes. At last, we explore the over-time effects of partisan media selective exposure on individuals, which helps understand the severe polarized political landscape in today’s America. The limitation is that we may need a more targeted survey or experiment to explore the relationship between authoritarian personality and political behavior, partisan media use in particular. Secondly, other potential influencing factors (e.g., political engagement, education) should be considered in future study. Thirdly, we need to include more policy issues (e.g., immigration, LGBTQ) in future study.

Keywords: authoritarian personality, partisan media selective exposure, policy preferences, media effects

Author

• Xinya Jiang, Nanjing University