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Media and Political Learning during the 2009 and 2013 German Federal Election Campaigns: A Study of Moderating Effects

Citizenship
Democracy
Elections
Media
Voting
Knowledge
Campaign
Sascha Huber
Universität Mannheim
Sascha Huber
Universität Mannheim
Anne Schäfer
Universität Mannheim
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck
Universität Mannheim

Abstract

Arguably, one of the most general and at the same time most important findings of research into political media effects is the conditional nature of media influence on political knowledge and other outcome variables. It rarely, if ever, occurs across the board. Rather media effects typically depend in complex patterns on attributes of the media themselves as well as their audiences. For the two most recent German Federal Election campaigns, our paper will explore these mechanisms for political knowledge gain from the mass media. Two types of knowledge that are essential for electors in order to be able to cast meaningful votes will be studied: policy knowledge (parties' issue positions) and procedural knowledge (understanding of the electoral system). News media will be distinguished by type (TV news, newspapers, online news) and information quality (TV news: public versus commercial, newspapers: broadsheets versus tabloids). We will develop and test hypotheses about how knowledge gain from mass media with different attributes is moderated by audience members' cognitive capacity (education), their motivation (need for cognition, need to evaluate, various forms of political and campaign interest) as well as their social background (gender, age). Moreover, we will analyse whether and how everyday political conversations improve or diminish voters' likelihood to learn from media. Different aspects of political talk are taken into account: how often and with how many fellow citizens voters talk about politics, whether these talks are characterized rather by agreement or disagreement, and how much the discussants know about politics. We will analyze data collected as parts of the 2009 and 2013 German Longitudinal Election Studies (GLES): pre-post-panel surveys whose pre-election waves were conducted as rolling cross-sections.