Perceived Opinion Climate Mediates the Effect of Selective Exposure on Political Polarization: Experimental Evidence From the Netherlands

• In Event: Who Will Win? The Media’s Role in the Formation of Electoral Expectations

Abstract

Recent research suggests that people tend to expose themselves to information they agree with beforehand, and this exposure increases political polarization. However, most research is conducted in the US, a country with a political landscape that is arguably much more polarized than many multi-party systems in Europe. Furthermore, relatively little is known on why exactly people polarize, and the knowledge on mediating mechanisms is based on correlational studies, which casts doubts on the hypothesized causal sequence.
This presentation addresses these shortcomings and presents results of a large-scale survey experiment focusing on attitudes towards immigration in the Netherlands. The mediating role of (1) frame acceptance, (2) knowledge gain, and (3) perceived opinion climate is investigated. The immigration issue in the Netherlands is highly politicized and enjoys widespread news coverage. Furthermore, it is an issue on which the audience is clearly divided along the left-right dimension, which makes it a suitable issue to study in this context.
We recruited 625 Dutch participants with both parents born in the Netherlands. After removal of invalid cases, N=501 were included in the analysis. Quotas were used to match age and gender with the Dutch population. In an online experiment, we first measured their attitudes on immigration and a number of control variables. n=70 participants were exposed to a pro-immigration article, n=71 to an against-immigration article (forced exposure), n=294 were allowed to choose (selective exposure), and a control group was given an article on astronomy (n=62). After exposure, attitude towards immigration was measured again, before the mediators frame acceptance, knowledge gain, and perceived public opinion were measured.
While there was little evidence for a direct polarizing effect of attitude congruent materials, the data demonstrated that an indirect effect takes place through the perceived opinion climate. In other words, people tend to take a more extreme position when, through a cue that is given by news media, they perceive the general opinion climate to be in line with their attitude. This was the case for both forced and self-selected exposure.

Authors

• Damian Trilling, U of Amsterdam

• Marijn Van Klingeren, ASCoR, U of Amsterdam

• Yariv Tsfati, U of Haifa