This chapter argues that the conventional theories and processes at the core of the discipline of political communication are rooted in assumptions that no longer hold and contexts that no longer exist

Young, Dannagal G., & Joanne Miller 2021. “Young and Miller, Political Communication in Oxford Handbook of Poli Psych 3rd Ed.” OSF Preprints. August 27. doi:10.31219/osf.io/mwdtu

Abstract: This chapter argues that the conventional theories and processes at the core of the discipline of political communication are rooted in assumptions that no longer hold and contexts that no longer exist. Today’s media users experience decentralized, interpersonal, horizontal, networked politically relevant communication every day. And they experience this socially-contextualized messaging within a system predicated on the economics and logics of micro-segmentation. We assert that these are qualitative shifts that necessitate a fundamental reconsideration and reimagining of the field of political communication. Specifically, we focus on how the shift away from traditional mass media models to networked, decentralized media systems through digital technologies has crucial implications for: a) the scope of what constitutes political communication and b) the integration of political psychology into the study of political communication.

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Echo Chambers. Another implication of the increasingly interpersonal nature of media experiences and the micro-segmentation of audiences is the potential formation of echo chambers and filter bubbles. As media choice increases, individuals can increasingly “opt in” or “out” of media experiences, facilitating selective exposure to and avoidance of ideologicallyconsonant – or even politically-relevant (Prior, 2007) – media content. In their paradigmchallenging essay, Bennett and Iyengar (2008) suggested that selectivity behaviors would be so great in this new media landscape, that media persuasion effects would all but disappear, even as other effects like agenda setting or priming might continue. “As media audiences devolve into smaller, like-minded subsets of the electorate,” they wrote, “it becomes less likely that media messages will do anything other than reinforce prior predispositions. Most media users will rarely find themselves in the path of attitude-discrepant information.” (p. 724).

Such “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” became a growing concern among political scientists and political communication scholars from 2000 - 2010s (Sunstein, 2001), as empirical examinations pointed to a public engaging in selective exposure and avoidance of politicallydissonant mediated information in ways that could fuel political polarization (Stroud, 2011; see below). Yet, while echo chambers and filter bubbles are certainly made possible through media fragmentation, research has failed to produce substantial evidence to support the notion that most people restrict themselves to only like-minded media content (see Guess et al, 2018; Guess, 2021). Although selective exposure to like-minded content does occur, and moral-emotional content from elites spreads efficiently within their ideological social networks (especially on the 27 right) (Brady et al., 2019), evidence of selective-avoidance of belief-disconfirming information is scarce (Garrett, 2009). Barbera et al, (2015) conclude that “homophilic tendencies in online interaction do not imply that information about current events is necessarily constrained by the walls of an echo chamber” (p. 1539). Users tend to have diverse media diets and vary in the extent to which they pay attention to political or current events information (Guess, 2018), and those users who do pay attention to like-minded political content, pay more, not less attention to belief-dissonant programming (Garrett, Carnahan, & Lynch, 2011, Nelson & Webster, 2017). Even on social media, where algorithms and users themselves increase the ideological homogeneity of their newsfeeds (Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic 2015), users are still exposed to some belief-disconfirming information. In fact, in the most fragmented context of all, the internet, selective exposure and avoidance is complicated by social networks, where social media posts of friends and family can serve as heuristics that guide ideologically diverse information consumption (Masip, SuauMartinez, & Ruiz-Caballero, 2017; Messing and Westwood, 2014; Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2016; Zuiderveen et al., 2016), even trumping partisan selective exposure (Anspach, 2017). These results are supported by Dylko et al (2018) who find that although customized media experiences increase selective exposure dynamics in ways that increase political polarization, this effect is limited to customization processes that are automatically embedded within a technology. When users have the ability to customize media experiences, these relationships shrink, again highlighting how user agency often diversifies – rather than homogenizes – media diets. Such findings certainly call into question Bennett and Iyengar’s (2008) pronouncement of the “demise of the inadvertent audience” (p. 717). Whereas media fragmentation facilitates selective exposure and avoidance, the interpersonal networked nature of the social media experience does not. Yet attending to and being receptive to belief-disconfirming content are two different things that may be motivated by different goals. Knobloch-Westerwick and Klienman (2012), for example, find that people engage in less selective avoidance of belief-disconfirming information when they expect their side is going to lose, pointing to anticipated “informational utility” as individuals anticipate that exposure to belief-disconfirming content “can aid individuals in making future decisions” (p. 171). Valentino et al.’s (2009) work is consistent with this explanatory mechanism, with individuals seeking out belief-disconfirming content as a way of monitoring their information environments. In this work, anxiety was found to fuel information seeking behaviors, thereby increasing exposure to belief-disconfirming content, illustrating that these consumption behaviors are shaped by emotional needs of the audience. Finally, calls to relax the fears of echo chambers and filter bubbles are focused on the modal cases – the most likely outcomes for most people. This raises questions about whether we should be more concerned about the outcomes of users at the margins - culturally and politically. Boutyline and Willer (2017) for example, found that social networks (on Twitter) were most homogenous among those users with the most extreme political views. Evidence about the moderating role of political engagement is mixed; Guess (20121 finds a positive relationship between political engagement and media diet homogeneity, whereas Dubois and Blank (2018) find the reverse (see also Eady et al. 2019). Emotions such as anger may fuel the kind of dynamics that lead to concerning echo-chambers, while fear and anxiety may mitigate them (Wollebaek et al., 2019). Recent work by Stier et al. (2020) indicates that populist attitudes interact with contextual factors to fuel selective exposure patterns, with populist attitudes 29 contributing to lower (but not zero) exposure to traditional news and greater exposure to hyperpartisan outlets.