05-03-2021 | Original Paper
Temporal Selective Exposure: How Partisans Choose When to Follow Politics
- Journal:
- Political Behavior
Important notes
Supplementary Information
The online version supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09690-1.
An earlier version of this paper—then titled “Switching on and off: Rethinking Partisan Selective Exposure”—was presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the International Communication and the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. It received the Top Paper Award from the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association. We thank participants of the seminars, Michael Delli Carpini, Josh Clinton, D.J. Flynn, Andrew Guess, Shanto Iyengar, Matt Levendusky, and Brendan Nyhan for their advice and feedback. The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania provided the Telephone and Online Panel components of the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES) Data.
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Abstract
It is widely theorized that echo chambers contribute to polarization, yet behavioral evidence of partisan selective exposure in the real world is surprisingly tenuous. Why do partisans have polarized perceptions even though they have relatively balanced media diets? We argue that partisans vary in terms of when they pay attention to the news, not just in terms of the ideological media sources they follow. By leveraging national election surveys across seven decades, as well as the sudden change in the economic news environment that was induced by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, we show that partisans vary their political attentiveness and media consumption in response to whether news events are congenial to their party. These findings suggest that partisans can subject themselves to biased information flows even if their media diets are balanced. The temporal dynamics of selective exposure carry important implications for mass polarization.
