Many observers question whether partisan television has a large, persuadable, and isolated audience capable of shaping public opinion. Limitations of survey-only measures left that question unresolved. This study uses three novel datasets that directly link behavioral television viewership to political administrative or survey data to provide clearer evidence.
A long-standing puzzle is whether powerful media outlets can shape public opinion when people self-select their news. A rare, exogenous event—the 30-year boycott of The Sun in Merseyside after the Hillsborough soccer disaster—creates leverage to answer that question. The boycott targeted the most important Eurosceptic tabloid in England and provides a quasi-experimental test of media effects on attitudes toward leaving the EU.
Online political advertising is booming. But how much does scholarship know? This gap exists because most research uses only televised ads.
This research asks whether and how politicians’ public criticisms of information providers change which sources their supporters find credible and how that alters opinion formation. Using two linked survey experiments, the authors investigate whether elite discrediting of a news outlet leads partisans to avoid that outlet, view it as biased, and discount its subsequent coverage — processes the paper frames as an indirect means of elite influence over public opinion.
Benchmarking theories propose that voters use information about other countries’ performance—most often on the economy and gained through personal experience or the media—to judge their own governments. Observational evidence for this idea is fragile and cannot easily separate how people become more informed. A pre-registered experiment investigates whether media-style visual comparisons serve as a channel for benchmarking and change government evaluations.
This paper asks whether voters’ affect toward groups made salient by housing policy explains opposition to new development and reforms. Drawing on symbolic politics theory, the authors test whether dislike of developers, investors, government approvers, or incoming residents helps account for anti-development preferences—especially for policies that are not tied to a specific local project. The contribution is experimental and causal: the authors report evidence from survey experiments and short-form video manipulations that link affect toward these actors to policy judgments.
This study investigates the surprising shift in American public opinion against lynching during the late 19th to early 20th century.