Understanding television viewing behavior is highly relevant, as it remains an important source of political news for many. Nowadays, viewers can choose between a growing diversity of formats cover...

This essay relates the resurgence of contemporary far-right1 politics to a distinctive querpolitics (a transverse or diagonal politics) of socially, politically, and ideologically heterogeneous ass...

The far right has moved from oppositional force to control over the last decades. This outcome is the result of a long-term process of renewal ultimately aimed at dismantling the liberal order. As ...

Social media influencers (SMIs) are not only important players in marketing but have also repeatedly posted about political issues on their channels. Yet, we lack insights into the prevalence of th...

The knowledge political communication scholars can provide is in high demand, helping regulators, politicians, and citizens to make sense of a seemingly crazy, unhinged world unfolding around them....

Fact-checks successfully persuade people to reject misinformation, but people who are exposed to misinformation rarely read fact-checks. This makes increasing the demand for fact-checking a crucial...

This study examines the relationship between partisan media consumption and changes in democratic values during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. By integrating self-reported news consumption da...

Evidence of discrimination against African Americans, based on high-quality field experiments, has become clearer, easier to communicate, and harder to counterargue. In two experimental studies, we...

To what extent have social media discussions of health racialized during the COVID-19 pandemic? How has the spread of racialized social media health content influenced attitudes about race and COVI...

Published in Political Communication (Vol. 41, No. 5, 2024)

Media scholars have long expressed concern that news outlets’ tendency to frame policy debates in terms of partisan conflict or political gamesmanship politicizes and polarizes public opinion. This...

This study aims to understand public reactions to statements about racial discrimination made by elected officials of color on Twitter. We argue that statements about race made by elected officials...

Drawing on transcripts from the television network Channel One, a popular news source in Russia, this article addresses the question: “How was Vladimir Putin covered by state-controlled media while...

Social media companies wield considerable power over what people can say and do online, with consequences for freedom of expression and participation in digital culture. Yet we still know little ab...

Digital media have fundamentally altered how knowledge is produced and distributed, often being blamed for contemporary democratic problems. This short essay examines recent contributions to normat...

Many assume that if citizens were more inclined to moralize the values of evidence-based and logical thinking, they would be less likely to share politically hostile, conspiratorial, and false clai...

Scholars have argued that populists disproportionately benefit from social media, and there is evidence that they attract more engagement than other politicians and parties in several countries. We...

Published in Political Communication (Vol. 41, No. 4, 2024)

Elites’ skepticism of scientific consensus presents a formidable challenge in addressing critical issues like climate change and global pandemics. While extensive research has explored the capacity...

Research about the epistemic crisis has largely treated epistemic threats in isolation, overlooking what they collectively say about the health of news environments. This study integrates the liter...

Conventional wisdom suggests that social media, especially when used by authoritarian powers with nefarious aims, leaves citizens of democratic countries vulnerable to psychological influence campa...

This study employs a comparative analytical framework to enhance our understanding of the conducive opportunity structures that foster emotionally charged political discourse. We examined 175,539 F...

Online political disinformation often relies on decontextualized or manipulated images. Visual content can make disinformation more attention-grabbing and credible as it offers a direct index of re...

Social media allow politicians to circumvent the gatekeeping role of news media by providing a platform on which they can communicate directly with and to their electorates. Still, politicians shar...

Published in Political Communication (Vol. 41, No. 5, 2024)

The increase in elites’ use of racial appeals has compelled some scholars of political communication to tell a more comprehensive story about political identity in the United States and elsewhere a...

Given that Facebook is still the most widely used social networking site in the world, its influence on democratic processes is under constant scrutiny. Academics have put a special focus on Facebo...

Recommendation algorithms that customize information feeds for individuals have raised concerns about exacerbating inequalities in news exposure among citizens. In response to these concerns, we co...

In many contemporary democracies, digital networks on the far-right have established themselves as “alternatives” to liberal institutions. Within this nexus of parties, hyper-partisan news, and soc...

This paper aims to clarify the mechanism linking media coverage and advertising to electoral volatility. It is argued that the link is indirect rather than direct: Parties’ communication affects el...

While there is growing academic attention to readers of hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracy (HAC) media, our understanding of these sites has developed in separate bodies of work. We make a ...

Digital literacy affects how people use the internet. However, we argue that the concept of “digital literacy” cannot usefully be applied to all internet users; there is simply too much heterogenei...

Studies addressing the normative questions of whether social media use positively or negatively affects citizens’ levels of democratic engagement and satisfaction with democracy have produced mixed...

People’s trust in science is generally high. Yet in public policy disputes invoking scientific issues, people’s trust in science is typically polarized, aligned with their political preferences. Th...

Does acquiring a media company pay off politically? A growing body of literature suggests that politically motivated media owners shape media coverage and that media coverage affects political beha...

How do far-right actors and issues structure public debates and become mainstream over time? Previous research has shown that far-right actors are central actors in political conflicts in Western E...

The popularity of camera phones, the availability of photo-editing apps, and the rise of visually oriented social media platforms have made it convenient for citizens to produce and circulate visua...

More aggressive campaigning styles focusing on criticizing opponents (negativity) or using inappropriate language to vilify opponents (incivility) tend to be disliked by voters, and remain thus ris...

Social media companies increasingly play a role in regulating freedom of speech. Debates over ideological motivations behind suspension policies of major platforms are on the rise. This study contr...

Mediated public diplomacy is a critical way of strategic communication for governments to influence global public opinion, especially during international conflicts. Based on the theories of mediat...

How often do political elites in the U.S. share low-quality news sources? Are there differences between the parties? While past work has investigated individuals sharing low-quality news sources, t...

How do ordinary citizens perceive and respond to different kinds of political polarization in the U.S.? Recent work shows that people believe that the parties are intensely polarized but, in realit...

Published in Political Communication (Vol. 41, No. 2, 2024)

In response to foreign meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign through social media – and subsequent congressional threats to tightly regulate online political advertising – major digital p...

Published in Political Communication (Vol. 41, No. 2, 2024)

This article examines the nationalist rhetoric of Biden and Trump in the 2020 presidential election, focusing on how the candidates represented, and contested, the meaning of American national iden...

Research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in communication research is gaining broader interest. This interdisciplinary interest has yet to be supported by a systematic scholarly definition and by a...

In recent years, popular interest in disinformation has coalesced around a series of high-profile events, starting with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. While Faceboo...

This study investigates the effect of online political ads on party preference, and whether this effect is more pronounced for newer political parties and voters who are less politically knowledgea...

As political partisanship intensifies, political similarity in romantic partnerships has become increasingly common. Still, there exist many for whom their romantic partnership is “cross-cutting,” ...

Extending literature on political polarization and political expression, we study patterns of polarized expression by vocal partisans from opposing camps on social media. Specifically, we argue tha...

Various studies have been devoted to explaining the conditions under which parties engage in attack behavior. However, the existing literature has overlooked the issues on which parties attack. Thi...

Do Latinos who consume more Spanish language media relative to English language media express greater political trust and efficacy? While research produces increasing evidence that variations in En...

In liberal democracies, journalists can engage the government by unearthing its scandals. Authoritarian regimes, where negative news about the government is heavily guarded, lack this process. Yet,...

Social media played a prominent role in the spread of vaccine-related fake news during the global COVID-19 crisis. Previous work has shown that both trait-related and situational factors influence ...

Most research on governments’ use of social media focuses on the national or federal level. We therefore know little about the way local authorities harness social media platforms to communicate wi...

Published in Political Communication (Vol. 41, No. 1, 2024)

Research on autocracies often posits that propaganda can manipulate citizens’ beliefs, but existing work does not systematically investigate how well individuals recognize misinformation in authori...

The goal of this reflective essay is to highlight challenges that junior and minority political communication researchers face and to advocate for scholarly solidarity practices, defined as actions...

Published in Political Communication (Vol. 41, No. 1, 2024)