The Participatory Potential of Emotional Personalization in News

• In Event: Emotions in Political Communication

Abstract

News media are frequently implicated in examinations of citizen apathy and low voter turnout. Large survey data sets are often used to do diagnostics at the macro level, testing the effects of news consumption on political participation in general terms, without much effort to parse variance in terms of the content and form of news messages. The experiment reported here tests how emotional personalization of news messages might influence political participation intent. The data (N=80) provide support for the idea that being exposed to news that features emotional testimonies of people with first-hand experience of social issues encourages political participation. Unlike most existing research would suggest, education-based variance in participation intent did not emerge. Taken together, these findings offer evidence that message characteristics such as personalization of social issues can elicit political engagement from news users, which in turn has potential to revitalize the public sphere.

Authors

• Ozen Bas, Indiana University

• Maria Elizabeth Grabe, Indiana U