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24 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 2

Who Follows Whom?

Who Follows Whom?
  • The Role of Geography and Similarity in Online Attention Networks
  • Alexi Quintana-Mathé, Zhen Guo, Nir Grinberg, David Lazer
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • Follower ties play a major role in many social media platforms, representing users' choices on what content to pay attention to. This Element examines the role of geography and similarity by gender, age, race, and partisanship with respect to attention in social media by studying the follower ties among 1.1 million Twitter accounts matched to U.S. voter records. We find that geographic proximity is the dominant predictor of follower ties, and that demographic similarity by age and race/ethnicity are quite important. Surprisingly, given the prominence of political polarization in the contemporary US, partisanship plays a relatively minor role. In addition, our results indicate that the tendency to follow nearby users leads to following users of the same race/ethnicity and partisanship. Our findings highlight the enduring significance of physical geography in virtual spaces and that political preference is not a dominant determinant of online attention in social media.
Emotions on Our Screens

Emotions on Our Screens
  • Talbot M. Andrews, Lauren P. Olson, Yanna Krupnikov
  • Published online:
    27 March 2026
    Print publication:
    23 April 2026
  • While scholars have long considered how political messages make people feel, changes in the media environment have given people unprecedented access to the expressed emotions of others. Through both contemporary news stories and social media, people now learn how others – often strangers – feel about political events. Do people believe in the sincerity of these expressed emotions? To answer this question, we turn to expressions about one of the most pressing issues of our time: climate change. We begin with a theoretic framework of the way people perceive mediated emotional expression. Then, across six pre-registered experiments, we find people are generally skeptical of others' emotional expression – perceiving emotional posts and quotes less authentic and appropriate than more neutral content. While evaluations vary by platform, our results suggest that emotions online aren't always taken at face value – complicating the role of these expressed emotions in political communication.
News Use, Political Knowledge, and Misperceptions in 18 Countries across the Global North

News Use, Political Knowledge, and Misperceptions in 18 Countries across the Global North
  • Peter Van Aelst, Luisa Gehle, Christian Schemer, Jesper Strömbäck, Alon Zoizner
  • Published online:
    23 February 2026
    Print publication:
    19 March 2026
  • The established idea that people learn about politics and relevant societal issues via the news media can be put into question because of a 'twin challenge of increased media choice.' First, there is a growing number of people who choose to avoid most news which leaves them uninformed about what is happening in politics and society. Second, people may form their beliefs based on false and misleading information, leading them to become misinformed about current political issues. This Element investigated both challenges based on data from a large comparative survey in eighteen Western countries. Consistent with the existing literature, the results largely confirm the added value of staying informed through using traditional news media, the public broadcaster in particular. In contrast, consuming news from newer media sources such as social media and messaging apps is typically associated across countries with less knowledge and more misperceptions about political matters.
Catching Fire in the News

Catching Fire in the News
  • The Necessary Conditions for Media Storms
  • Amber E. Boydstun, Jill R. Laufer, Dallas Card, Noah A. Smith
  • Published online:
    28 January 2026
    Print publication:
    26 February 2026
    • Element
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      • Open access
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  • Why do some events catch fire in the news, producing a media storm, while many similar events go all but unnoticed? This Element uses a fire triangle analogy to explain the necessary conditions of media storms. The “heat” is the spark: a dramatic event or discovery. The “fuel” is the political and cultural landscape, including similar items in recent news, and current debates that allow the event to be framed in a resonant way. The “oxygen” is the available news agenda space, plus attention the event receives beyond the news (by activists, politicians, people on social media, etc.). Media storms are not easily predictable; it takes the right event, at the right time, with the right momentum of attention. But when the political stars align and a media storm erupts, it can be a window of opportunity for change. This Element is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Amplifying Extremism

Amplifying Extremism
  • Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism
  • Nik Usher, Jessica C. Hagman
  • Published online:
    19 May 2025
    Print publication:
    12 June 2025
  • Within a week, a no-name Republican state representative from a town of 384 people in Illinois catapulted from obscurity to a prime-time appearance on Fox News' Ingraham Angle. This newly empowered politician, Darren Bailey, would go on to steer the pro-business Republican party in Illinois toward extremism. Democratic backsliding emerges across all levels of politics, but the threats posed by small-town politicians have been overshadowed by national-level politicians. This microstudy of a single politician's debut in the public eye showcases a novel approach to media corpus construction that combines proprietary and open databases, aggregated search tools, and targeted searching, and includes local, regional, and national news across digital-first, radio, news publishers, broadcast and cable television, and social media. The Element provides unique insights into how American journalism creates space for small-town extremists to gain power, especially given declines in local news.
Political Representation as Communicative Practice

Political Representation as Communicative Practice
  • Fabio Wolkenstein, Christopher Wratil
  • Published online:
    24 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 March 2025
  • It is uncontroversial that the quality of democracy is closely bound up with the quality of political representation. But what exactly is political representation and how should we study it? This Element develops a novel conceptual framework for studying political representation that makes the insights of recent theoretical work on representation usable for quantitative empirical research. The theoretical literature the authors build on makes the case for changing the understanding of representation in two ways. First, it proposes to conceive representation in constructivist terms, as a practice that is shaped by both representatives and represented. Second, it treats communicative acts by representatives that address constituents and different analytical dimensions contained in them as the central categories of analysis; political representation is thus conceived as an essentially communicative practice. This Element argues that quantitative research can benefit from taking these innovations seriously, and it provides the conceptual tools for doing so.
Social Media Democracy Mirage

Social Media Democracy Mirage
  • How Social Media News Fuels a Politically Uninformed Participatory Democracy
  • Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Hugo Marcos Marné, Manuel Goyanes, Rebecca Scheffauer
  • Published online:
    20 November 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • For over two decades, political communication research has hailed the potentially reinvigorating effect of social media on democracy. Social media was expected to provide new opportunities for people to learn about politics and public affairs, and to participate politically. Building on two systematic literature reviews on social media, and its effects on political participation and knowledge (2000–2020), and introducing empirical evidence drawing on four original US survey data that expands for over a decade (2009–2020), this Element contends that social media has only partially fulfilled this tenet, producing a Social Media Democracy Mirage. That is, social media have led to a socio-political paradox in which people are more participatory than ever, yet not necessarily more informed.
Angry and Wrong

Angry and Wrong
  • The Emotional Dynamics of Partisan Media and Political Misperceptions
  • Brian Weeks
  • Published online:
    19 September 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • Use of partisan media is often associated with political misperceptions but little research has investigated whether partisan media can change beliefs and, if so, the mechanism through which that process occurs. This Element argues that political anger provides one key theoretical link between partisan media use and political misperceptions. Using three-wave panel survey data collected in the United States during the 2020 election, I show that people who use more partisan media are more angry and misinformed than less frequent or non-users. More importantly, consuming partisan media-particularly conservative media-can make people angrier about politics over time and this anger subsequently reduces the accuracy of political beliefs. While audiences for partisan media remain small, the findings indicate that partisan media play an important role in shaping political emotions and beliefs and offer one promising explanation for why their audiences are more likely to hold more inaccurate beliefs about politics.
How News Coverage of Misinformation Shapes Perceptions and Trust

How News Coverage of Misinformation Shapes Perceptions and Trust
  • Emily Thorson
  • Published online:
    28 May 2024
    Print publication:
    20 June 2024
  • This Element takes on two related questions: How do the media cover the issue of misinformation, and how does exposure to this coverage affect public perceptions, including trust? A content analysis shows that most media coverage explicitly blames social media for the problem, and two experiments find that while exposure to news coverage of misinformation makes people less trusting of news on social media, it increases trust in print news. This counterintuitive effect occurs because exposure to news about misinformation increases the perceived value of traditional journalistic norms. Finally, exposure to misinformation coverage has no measurable effect on political trust or internal efficacy, and political interest is a strong predictor of interest in news coverage of misinformation across partisan lines. These results suggest that many Americans see legacy media as a bulwark against changes that threaten to distort the information environment.
The YouTube Apparatus

The YouTube Apparatus
  • Kevin Munger
  • Published online:
    29 April 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
    • Element
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      • Open access
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  • The academic agenda for studying social media and politics has been somewhat haphazard. Thanks to rapid technological change, a cascade of policy-relevant crises, and sheer scale, we do not have a coherent framework for deciding what questions to ask. This Element articulates such a framework by taking existing literature from media economics and sociology and applying it reflexively, to both the academic agenda and to the specific case of politics on YouTube: the Supply and Demand Framework. The key mechanism, traced over the past century, is the technology of audience measurement. The YouTube audience comes pre-rationalized in the form of Likes, Views and Comments, and is thus unavoidable for all actors involved. The phenomenon of 'radicalization' is best understood as a consequence of accelerated feedback between audiences and creators, radicalizing each other. I use fifteen years of supply and demand data from YouTube to demonstrate how different types of producers respond more or less to this feedback, which in turn structures the ideological distribution of content consumed on the platform. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Constructing Political Expertise in the News

Constructing Political Expertise in the News
  • Kathleen Searles, Yanna Krupnikov, John Barry Ryan, Hillary Style
  • Published online:
    02 February 2023
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023
  • Expert news sources offer context and act as translators, communicating complex policy issues to the public. Therefore, these sources have implications for who, and what is elevated and legitimized by news coverage. This element considers patterns in expert sources, focusing on a particular area of expertise: politics. As a starting point, it conducts a content analysis tracking which types of political experts are most likely to be interviewed, using this analysis to explain patterns in expert sourcing. Building on the source data, it next conducts experiments and surveys of journalists to consider demand for expert sources. Finally, shifting the analysis to the supply of expert sources, it turns to a survey of faculty to track expert experiences with journalists. Jointly, the results suggest underlying patterns in expert sourcing is a tension between journalists' preferences, the time constraints of producing news, and the preferences of the experts themselves.
Battleground

Battleground
  • Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin
  • Lewis A. Friedland, Dhavan V. Shah, Michael W. Wagner, Katherine J. Cramer, Chris Wells, Jon Pevehouse
  • Published online:
    17 February 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • Battleground models Wisconsin's contentious political communication ecology: the way that politics, social life, and communication intersect and create conditions of polarization and democratic decline. Drawing from 10 years of interviews, news and social media content, and state-wide surveys, we combine qualitative and computational analysis with time-series and multi-level modeling to study this hybrid communication system – an approach that yields unique insights about nationalization, social structure, conventional discourses, and the lifeworld. We explore these concepts through case studies of immigration, healthcare, and economic development, concluding that despite nationalization, distinct state-level effects vary by issue as partisan actors exert their discursive power.
Digital Transformations of the Public Arena

Digital Transformations of the Public Arena
  • Andreas Jungherr, Ralph Schroeder
  • Published online:
    23 December 2021
    Print publication:
    27 January 2022
  • Digital technologies have changed the public arena, but there is little scholarly consensus about how they have done so. This Element lays out a new framework for the digitally mediated public arena by identifying structural changes and continuities with the pre-digital era. It examines three country cases – the United States, Germany, and China. In these countries and elsewhere, the emergence of new infrastructures such as search engines and social media platforms increasingly mediate and govern the visibility and reach of information, and thus reconfigure the transmission belt between citizens and political elites. This shift requires a rethinking of the workings and dysfunctions of the contemporary public arena and ways to improve it.
The Increasing Viability of Good News

The Increasing Viability of Good News
  • Stuart Soroka, Yanna Krupnikov
  • Published online:
    15 June 2021
    Print publication:
    12 August 2021
  • In spite of what appears to be the increasingly negative tone of media coverage, this Element suggests that the prevalence of positive news is likely to increase, for three reasons: (1) valence-based asymmetries vary over time, (2) valence-based asymmetries vary across individuals, and (3) technology facilitates diverse news platforms catering to diverse preferences. Each of these claims is examined in detail here, based on analyses of prior and/or novel data on media content, psychophysiological responses, and survey-based experiments. Results are considered as they relate to our understanding of media gatekeeping, political communication, and political psychology, and also as actionable findings for producers of media content, communications platforms, and media consumers.

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