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W2749077506 abstract "In their daily routine, all citizens partake, albeit not always consciously, in mass communication. This communication takes place in various channels, such as newspapers, magazines, television, billboards, and social media sites. It even occurs indirectly via discussions with other media users. Extensive research over the past decades has shown that these contacts with media content may have effects on the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and even physiological level (Potter 2012: 35ff). Such media effects are of special significance where they are intended by political or social stakeholders, aiming to alter public opinion or influence and mobilize voters. Due to their role as intermediaries between the political system and the public, media organizations and journalists who produce and relay content to citizens play a major role in current democracies (Kübler and Kriesi 2017). They fulfil an important double-function in a democracy by informing the public of political processes and reflecting the public opinion for the political elites. It has been argued that any deliberate use of the media as an instrument to manipulate public opinion or political processes would pose a strong challenge to any modern democracy. This challenge was investigated in The National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Democracy in three extensive research projects that focused on the extent and nature of media effects on public opinion under varying circumstances. In a combined research design, panel surveys, media content analyses, and experiments were conducted to assess the role of media effects in the run-up of referenda, in mediated public debates, and in the context of populism. In this paper, we first provide an overview and typology of media effects with focus their political relevance before briefly presenting and discussing the results from this research project. Media may affect the audience in a wide variety of ways (for reviews, see Bryant et al. 2013; Nabi and Oliver 2009; Potter 2012), Not all of which are relevant to the assessment of challenges to democracies. In this chapter, we systematically outline the theoretical range of media effects based on the Media Effects Template (MET: Potter 2012) to provide a short overview and single out the effects most relevant to the question how media may pose a challenge to democracy. The MET uses a two-dimensional typology of media effects. The first dimension concerns the type of reaction to media content and includes cognitive, affective, physiological, and conative reactions, with the cognitive being divided to beliefs, thought-patterns, and attitudes. In the second dimension, four general classes of media effects – acquiring, triggering, altering, and reinforcing – are proposed (Potter 2012). Media effects may be witnessed in any combination of these reactions and classes. The first class of effects discussed in the MET concerns media effects leading to the acquisition of novel information. These effects may include the encounter and incorporation of information or emotional and physical reactions to an issue or actor. Here, cognitive acquisition is of special relevance in political communication as media constitute the single most important source of information on the political system for any given citizen (Jarren 2008). Through the media, citizens learn about the context and relevance of issues, about arguments, interpretations, conflicts, and actors (Patterson 1980). An important effect based on learning from the media constitutes the agenda-setting function of mass media (McCombs and Shaw 1972). Agenda-Setting theory holds that citizens learn about the importance and social relevance of issues from mass communication. Studies repeatedly found that the more prominently an issue is discussed, the more relevant it is perceived by citizens (McCombs 2005) or politicians (Helfer 2016). On a second level it has even been found that citizens learn which issues are most relevant when talking about specific political candidates from their association with these issues in the news (McCombs et al. 2000). Further, citizens may learn causes, effects and moral evaluations from the media (Entman 1993), or specific ways of interpreting and thinking about an issue from the way it is frequently framed in the media (Scheufele 1999). Taken together, media have the potential to teach citizens not only “what to think about. The news also tell us how to think about it” (McCombs and Shaw 1993: 62). The second class of media effects covers effects involved in triggering information, emotions, or thought-patterns in the audience. In political communication, these effects become relevant when they lead to emotional or behavioral responses of citizens. Consequences of emotional reactions to messages range from higher or lower susceptibility to persuasive elements and the willingness of partaking in public discussions on an individual level to inciting debates or even moral panic on a macro-societal level. In the current media environment where lengthy discussions in commentary sections and readers’ reactions on social media are economically relevant, these triggering effects have become important to media organizations as well as political actors. Actors deliberately provoke these effects to gain attention and fuel moral panics in favor of their own agenda (Hartleb 2013). Using media content as a tool to mobilize voters in this way may pose a challenge to democracy as it bypasses deliberative channels and favors quick, emotion-driven decisions. The third class of media effects includes all effects able to turn individuals’ attitudes, opinions, thought-patterns, or behavior. These effects are relevant in advertising campaigns where actors seek to persuade citizens or customers of an opinion or behavior. With regard to the influence on voters, several influential theories have been proposed for altering media effects. On an affective level, it has been proposed that the repeated exposure to candidates and symbols may enhance the attitude of the audience toward them (Bornstein 1989). For cognitive attitudes, it has been reasoned that biased reporting favoring a position may cause individuals to favor this position (Entman 2007). Likewise, media may change the way citizens interpret certain issues by framing them in a specific way (Scheufele 1999). Finally, media may even influence the behavior of citizens in the public by suggesting a strong majority on a specific position. As citizens who believe to be part of a minority are more likely to refrain from speaking publicly about this issue, these individuals prefer to remain silent in public (Noelle-Neumann 1974; Scheufele and Moy 2000). The fourth class of media effects subsumes all stabilizing and reinforcing effects media may have on the audience. These effects include the confirmation of prior beliefs and attitudes, the perpetuation of existing thought-patterns, and the reinforcement of emotional and behavioral responses. Departing from Festinger's (2001) notion that individuals desire to reduce cognitive dissonance and seek for confirmation, these effects are expected to be strong. Moreover, as individuals seek to discuss their views with like-minded peers and are likely to use media outlets that do not conflict with their own views (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944), daily media exposure is more likely to confirm strong prior attitudes and beliefs than to alter them. In media effects research, however, these effects are most difficult to assess precisely because the absence of change is not lightly to be interpreted as an effect. Stability of opinions and thought-patterns may also be caused by indifference or insensitive measurement. Any test of reinforcement and stability requires complex experimental settings and may not simply be reduced to the absence of significant change. Nevertheless, reinforcing effects have been positively identified in the field of political communication (for an overview, see: Garramore and Atkin 1986). In sum, media effects on voters comprise a wide range of specific effects. Where these effects are able to mobilize voters or influence the way people evaluate and think about issues, a closer look into processes and actors influencing media content is called for. If media are found to actively influence public opinion, media owners and journalists pose a serious challenge to democracy and their legitimacy as non-elected intermediary actors in current democracies may be questioned (van Aelst et al. 2008). Media effects research has been employing different research paradigms to investigate the various effects of media on individuals or on public opinion. The most central methods for investigating these effects are experimental studies, (panel-) surveys, and linkage studies (Bryant et al. 2013). All approaches have distinct advantages and challenges when it comes to answering questions on the nature and extent of media effects. In experimental studies, respondents are placed in a controlled environment in which they are confronted with isolated messages. Slight variations of these messages can then be linked to variance in the attitudes and behavior of respondents. Using this paradigm, causal chains, psychologic pathways, moderating influences, and cognitive patterns may be observed and measured in great detail. On the downside, these experimental settings present the respondents with situations that do not necessarily occur in their daily routine. In survey studies, respondents are asked about their attitudes and their media use. These answers can be used to find correlations between media use and knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs. This paradigm is mostly used to investigate media effects on an aggregate level, such as the agenda-setting effect of mass media. Individual effects, causal relations, and psychological pathways remain a black box under this paradigm. Combining both approaches, linkage analyses have been proposed as a form of quasi-experimental setting in media effects research (Miller et al. 1979). In these hybrid settings, panel surveys are combined with quantitative or qualitative content analyses of media content between the panel waves. After assessing the content of media outlets indicated to be used by the respondents, each respondent is assigned numeric values for the media content they were likely to be exposed to. Media content is then used as quasi-experimental factor to explain variance on the individual level. This paradigm allows for the identification of effects on the individual level in real-world settings. On the downside, it has to be noted that the effects found in these studies are generally underestimated (Scharkow and Bachl 2016) and their cost is considerably higher than that of an isolated survey or an experiment. One of the goals of the NCCR Democracy was to investigate the role of the media and the challenge they pose to democracy and political processes. In this line of research, the challenge posed by media effects has been investigated in a succession of individual projects. In order to capture the most relevant media effects and study their nature and extent, we conducted a research program including three large-scale linkage-studies and a series of accompanying experiments and field experiments. The first part of the research program addressed the question whether media content influences the way voters think about upcoming referenda in Switzerland. Three public votes between 2006 and 2008 were analyzed using linkage-analyses. For all elections, the media content of the largest Swiss newspapers two months prior to the vote was assessed for actors, positions, arguments, and bias. Linking this data to panel surveys at the beginning of the campaigns and after the vote, we were able to assess different types of media effects. For acquiring effects we found a strong second-level agenda-setting effect in that citizens found salient aspects of an issue in their primarily used news source were more important than others (Wirth et al., 2010). Learning effects concerning the acquisition of new information was only found in previously unknown issues, such as tax policies. In familiar issues, such as immigration and asylum law, people did not learn new arguments from the media (Kriesi 2011). Triggering and persuasive effects have been found both in unknown and familiar issues. We found that arguments resonating with the own opinion have the potential to trigger emotional responses and changing an individual's opinion via emotional attitudes (Schemer 2009). Likewise, individuals are persuaded by arguments matching with their core values (Schemer et al. 2012). Further, it was shown that respondents changed their interpretations of issues according to salient interpretations in their media outlets (Wettstein 2012). Departing from the focus on decisions and campaigns, a second project focused on the framing of public debates without imminent decision and its long-term effects on citizens. Applying the linkage-approach to a cross-cultural study, we quantitatively assessed the media content on the issue of unemployment in six European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Great-Britain, Italy, Switzerland) for three months and conducted a panel-survey with one wave at the beginning and one wave at the end of this interval. Contrary to the effects found for political campaigns in the run-up of referenda, we could not identify strong learning or altering effects of media content. The attitudes and opinions of citizens generally remained stable in this period in spite of media content differing with their own views. We did find, however, that emotional responses triggered by suitably framed texts led to shifts in preferences for future policies (Kühne 2015; Kühne and Schemer 2015). In the light of current rise of populism in politics and the media (Kübler and Kriesi 2017), a third research program was dedicated to media effects in the context of populism. Here, both the effect of media content on populist attitudes in the public and the persuasiveness of populist appeals on issue policies were investigated (Wirth et al. 2016). A linkage-analysis over the period of one year in four metropolitan areas (London, Paris, Berlin, and Zürich) was conducted to measure these effects in countries with strong and weak populist actors. In this project, we found strong evidence for reinforcing media effects on populist attitudes as populist communication in the news had a polarizing effect on the audience. Only for individuals high in populist attitude did this form of communication lead to an increase, while it led to a decrease in populist attitudes in others (Müller et al. 2017). Likewise, we could show that individuals have a strong tendency to interpret texts according to their own previously held ideas and accuse the media of misrepresenting the truth when confronted with counter-attitudinal messages (Schulz et al. 2017). Both results point toward stabilizing media effects. Concerning the persuasiveness of populist appeals on issues, we have found little conclusive evidence to date. First analyses (unpublished) indicate that populist communication may enhance persuasiveness of a message by provoking emotional responses, such as anger or fear. Likewise, dramatizing and emotional style make readers more susceptive to populist appeals. However, since most political actors as well as journalists employ populist communication styles and content (Wettstein and Büchel 2017), conflicting appeals might cancel each other out in everyday communication. Media have been shown to have a wide variety of effects on the audience. These effects range from triggering an emotional response to persuading a voter to change candidate preferences during a campaign. Depending on the strength of these effects and their deliberate application in political communication, both by political actors and journalists, these effects may pose a challenge to democracy. In a research program investigating media effects over twelve years in different situations and political contexts, we aimed to quantitatively assess these effects in current democracies. Consistent with previous research, we found evidence for agenda-setting-, learning- and framing-effects during political campaigns. Albeit significant and with relevant implications for media coverage in campaigns, however, the size of these effects was found to be weak. This may be due to the research paradigm of linkage analyses which tends to underestimate results (Scharkow and Bachl 2016), and to the fact that the effect size of media effects on an individual level are generally low (Lang 2013). In all studies, however, we could find strong evidence and pathways of reinforcing media effects. Generally, citizens were found to have stable opinions and to ignore or counter-argue messages conflicting with their own opinion. This general pattern, however, was impaired by several conditions. On the side of individuals, these conditions included emotional responses, insecurity, media reliance, and personal beliefs and values resonating with media content. On the side of message properties, repetition of messages and consensus of media outlets have been found to enhance media effects. In conclusion, we found that media - and especially individual media outlets - do not have the power to swing public opinion or manipulating their readers at will. Far from a simple stimulus-response model of media effects, we have found a multitude of conditional and complex media effects which depend on individual predispositions and situations. The effects of news coverage on the public as a whole are therefore hardly predictable by political or media actors. Future research will show whether targeted news and advertising on social media – taking into account personality traits, beliefs, and preferences of the recipient – may overcome this limitation and serve as a tool to influence voters. Targeted campaigns are currently being established as a tool of voter persuasion1 and may profoundly change the way media affect citizens. Research for this manuscript was conducted in the framework of the National Centre of Competence in Research “Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century” at the University of Zurich and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Martin Wettstein is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Media Psychology and Effects at the University of Zurich. In research and teaching, he focuses on quantitative methods and public opinion dynamics. Address for correspondence: Institute for Mass Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, CH-8050 Zurich, Switzerland. Phone: +41 44 635 20 78; Email: m.wettstein@ipmz.uzh.ch Werner Wirth is full professor for empirical research and head of Department of Media Psychology and Effects at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on cognitive, emotional and persuasive aspects of media use, media reception, and media effects. Email: w.wirth@ipmz.uzh.ch" @default.
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W2749077506 title "Media Effects: How Media Influence Voters" @default.
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