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This study seeks to understand how populist radical-right (PRR) attitudes and political involvement relate to individuals’ political information consumption and selective exposure to ideological content. The study approaches political information selection as a two-step phenomenon: first, individuals use different amounts of political information, and second, they rely on attitude-consonant information to different degrees. Results from a combination of survey measures, implicit association tests and automated text analysis of large-scale online tracking data collected in Germany and Switzerland in 2020 showed that first, political information consumption was related to political involvement but also to PRR attitudes—in different ways—in both countries. Second, our analyses revealed country variations regarding attitude-consonant online PRR exposure. Third, implicit PRR attitudes were not relevant in explaining the use of PRR content online. We discuss the relevance of moving beyond analyses of traditional news toward the breadth of political information consumption, country contexts, and naturalistic research designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical look at the promises and drawbacks of a popular, novel data collection technique—online tracking—from the point of view of sample composition. Using data from two large-scale studies about political attitudes and information consumption behavior carried out in Germany and Switzerland, we find that the likelihood of participation in a tracking study at several critical dropout points is systematically related to the gender, age, and education of participants, with men, young, and more educated participants being less likely to dropout of the studies. Our findings also show that these patterns are incremental, as changes in sample composition accumulate over successive study stages. Political interest and ideology were also significantly related to the likelihood of participation in tracking research. The study explores some of the most common concerns associated with tracking research leading to non-participation, finding that they also differ across demographic groups. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conceptualize and measure right‐wing populism (RWP) as a three‐dimensional concept, explicitly and implicitly, based on online surveys and implicit association tests (IATs) in Germany and Switzerland. Confirmatory factor analyses show that explicit populism, nativism, and authoritarianism establish the latent RWP‐construct and that they are each related to their respective implicit counterpart. However, RWP ideology does not exist as an equally robust construct in the implicit realm as it does in the explicit realm. Resulting implicit‐explicit incongruence is psychologically meaningful in that it is moderated by willingness to comply with perceived social norms: For participants who perceive that their own political views differ from their social environment and who conceal their diverging opinions, implicit attitudes differ more strongly from explicit attitudes. This supports our rationale that explicit expression of RWP‐ideology is subject to social‐compatibility concerns. Hence, corresponding implicit attitudes are useful to fully assess the RWP potential within society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores shifts in political trust during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, examining the role that media consumption and threat perceptions played in individuals' trust in politics. We combine panel surveys taken before and during the first nation-wide lockdown with webtracking data of participants' online behaviour to paint a nuanced picture of media effects during the crisis. Our work has several findings. First, political trust, an attitude known for its stability, increased following lockdown. Second, consumption of mainstream news on COVID-19 directly hindered this increase, with those reading more news having lower over-time trust, while the relatively minor alternative news consumption had no direct effect on political trust. Third, threat perceptions a) to health and b) from the policy response to the pandemic, have strong and opposite effects on political trust, with threats to health increasing trust, and threats from the government policy response decreasing it. Lastly, these threat perceptions condition the effect of COVID-19 news consumption on political trust: perceptions of threat had the power to both exacerbate and mute the effect of media consumption on government trust during the pandemic. Notably, we show that the expected negative effect of alternative news on political trust only exists for those who did not think COVID-19 posed a threat to their health, while public service news consumption reduced the negative effect produced by government threat perceptions. The paper therefore advances our understanding of the nuanced nature of media effects, particularly as relates to alternative media, especially during moments of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing importance of online information environments, researchers have started investigating direct measures of online media use, such as online tracking. Most existing studies using tracking data have so far relied on commercial solutions, but these have limitations in terms of their costliness, replicability, and applicability to certain research questions. Hence, different research groups are developing their own tracking solutions for academic purposes. In this paper, we provide a critical review and classification of the existing approaches, apt to guide research decisions on the appropriate tracking approach and tool. First, we develop criteria to distinguish different user-centric desktop and mobile tracking approaches and tools (types of information, technical complexity, privacy implementation, user experience, and availability). Second, we describe different tools and approaches – separately for desktop and mobile tracking – with concrete examples and evaluate them using the aforementioned criteria. Finally, we discuss how different mobile and desktop tracking solutions can complement each other and provide recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines which parties included European issues in their 2014 European Parliament campaigns, and what influenced whether they did so, based on innovative data from the content analysis of 9,100 press releases in seven countries. Overall, established and especially governing parties no longer shied away from EU issues, referring to them as often as challenger parties did. The likelihood of EU issues in campaigns derives from a combination of predictors from the selective emphasis and co-orientation approaches. In general, parties with high internal dissent on EU integration avoid European issues, and weak leaders will only dare talk about the EU if internal dissent is low. However, between-party-type comparisons indicate that successful leaderships of governing parties facing strong internal divisions are even less likely to put EU issues on the agenda. With respect to the co-orientation model, parties' EU focus seems to be mainly determined by the communication of (other) opposition parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change was hardly debated during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Against this background and building upon Fraser's concept of counterpublics (1990), this paper examines whether climate change advocates used the English-speaking blogosphere to push their positions forward. This study uses blog data starting from the Republican nomination of Donald Trump (20 July 2016) to Election Day (8 November 2016) and applies a computerized classification algorithm and topic-modeling techniques to explore, first, the salience of skeptic and advocate positions toward climate change in the English-speaking blogosphere and, second, with which topics these positions are most connected. The results show that the positions and topics of climate change advocates were more salient online than those of climate-change skeptics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Thus, the study shows that the relation between different publics in societal discourses is not static but may change dynamically over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]