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Technological change has produced a high-choice media environment in which selective exposure and news avoidance are increasingly feasible and common. The literature has suggested several correlates of news avoidance, and recent work has particularly emphasized the potential significance of negative affective responses to news. This paper argues for the use of psychophysiological methods to better understand how emotional responses drive news avoidance. In doing so, we question the assumption—evident both in the literature on physiology and news, and in the literature on news and newsmaking—that physiological activation is positively associated with attention. We also offer an expository analysis of data from a physiological experiment in which respondents viewed stories for which activation quite likely motivated increased prolonged attention amongst some respondents, but a desire to avoid that content amongst others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a marked shift in the salience and politicization of any incorporation of race into teaching at the elementary and secondary levels. "Critical race theory" (CRT) has become a prominent feature of the current debate, even as there is a good deal of misunderstanding about what CRT actually is. Drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment, we consider the impact of the phrase "critical race theory" in activating both racial biases and partisan identity. Our expectation was that CRT would tend to activate partisanship independent of symbolic racism. Results suggest otherwise: where support for culturally relevant pedagogy is concerned, CRT appears to engage partisanship particularly amongst those who exhibit high levels of symbolic racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the apparent effect of political multiculturalism on tolerance of Muslim accommodation among native-born majority members. Our principle goal is in understanding how public opinion on religious accommodation varies as a function of both federal multicultural policy, on one hand, and more deeply rooted notions of political culture, on the other. We do so by examining responses to a pair of survey experiments embedded in surveys conducted in Canada and the United States. The experiments allow us to convincingly demonstrate “Muslim exceptionalism.” Contextual comparisons across multicultural policy regimes (Canada and the United States) and within them but across distinct political cultures (Quebec vs. English Canada) lend credence to a fairly subdued role for policy and a much larger one for political culture. These effects are, we argue and show, strongly moderated by support for multiculturalism at the individual-level.

Mass media are often portrayed as having large effects on democratic politics. Media content is not simply an exogenous influence on publics and policymakers, however. There is reason to think that this content reflects publics and politics as much as—if not more than—it affects them. This letter examines those possibilities, focusing on interactions between news coverage, budgetary policy, and public preferences in the defense, welfare, and health-care domains in the United States. Results indicate that media play a largely reflective role. Taking this role into account, we suggest, leads to a fundamentally different perspective on how media content matters in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a theoretical approach that highlights the role of identity in information exposure and processing. This Identity Driven Information Ecosystem (IDIE) approach is premised on the idea that everyone's information ecosystem varies, shaped by who they are, where they live, and who they interact with. Identities play a crucial role in determining the sites of communication that individuals use and engage with, and as a result, there are systematic differences in where people get information, what information they see, and how they react to it. This article lays out an argument for how identity is associated with the information we are exposed to, select, believe, and share; and it argues that identity, technology, affordances, and structures interact to shape our information ecosystems. The article concludes with a case study of the COVID-19 pandemic as an illustration of applying the IDIE approach to understand individual-level variation in information ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elites forming a perception of what the public wants is an important way in which democratic representation comes about, the assumption holds. Yet very few are the studies that examine the effect of elite perceptions on politician action. This study sets out to revisit the matter, measuring actual public priorities, elite perceptions of public priorities and a wide range of representative actions with regard to a few hundred concrete issues. We find that elite perceptions matter for their representative behavior; elites are much more likely to take action on issues they believe citizens care about. The effect exists across the board; perceptions matter in three different political systems, for different types of political action, and for electorally safe and unsafe, trustee and delegate politicians alike. These results speak to the micro-level factors connecting public and policy agendas, and the conditions under which representatives are attentive to public issue priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]