Chad Murphy

Polarized Political Communication, Oppositional Media Hostility, and Selective Exposure

Previous research has consistently documented a hostile media effect in which people see bias in balanced reporting on political controversies. In the contemporary fragmented media environment, partisan news outlets intentionally report political news from ideological perspectives, raising the possibility that ideologically biased news may cause viewers to become increasingly suspicious of and antagonistic toward news media—which we call oppositional media hostility. However, the fragmented media environment also gives television viewers ample opportunities to tune out news outlets with which they disagree as well as the news altogether, and this should moderate oppositional media hostility. We investigate the effects of partisan news shows on media perceptions across six laboratory-based experiments. We find that counterattitudinal news programming is more likely to induce hostile media perceptions than proattitudinal programming, but that the presence of choice blunts oppositional media hostility. We ex...

The Paradox of Redistricting: How Partisan Mapmakers Foster Competition but Disrupt Representation:

The authors examine constituency changes induced by redistricting and ask three questions:What explains the amount of instability and uncertainty induced by redistricting? Does uncertainty affect legislators’ career choices? How do these changes affect election outcomes? The authors show that partisan redistricting plans are able to produce significant instability between elections, especially for opposing-party incumbents. Their findings have important implications for representation: through redistricting, strategic actors can disrupt the stability that many theorists would consider paramount for the operation of a democratic republic. The authors show that the effects of redistricting go beyond the simple examination of changes in each district’s underlying partisanship.

The Use of Peer Modeling to Increase Self-Efficacy in Research Methods Courses

One of the biggest challenges students face in any undergraduate methods course is a lack of confidence in their mathematical abilities, leading to a struggle for both retention of information and for continued involvement in research-based courses. In my article, I present a new approach to improving self-efficacy in undergraduate methods students and show that self-reported measures of learning improved as well as the completion of senior theses and directed research opportunities increased in the subsequent semester over previous years. Specifically, instead of teaching the course through academic articles and lessons from a textbook, I used a paper from the same course written by a former student as an exemplar of how to write a research paper. The peer-modeling approach improved student evaluations of the course immediately following the semester, increased the number of students involved in independent research subsequent to the course, and showed a high self-reported level of retention and use of research methods over a year after the course was completed.

Expanding the Scope of Selective Exposure: An Objective Approach to Measurement of Media Ideology

The literature on selective exposure has made inestimable advances in our understanding of media and its effect on politics and the general public. However, much of the research on this topic has relied on potentially inaccurate assumptions. In our paper we apply an open-source, publicly available, high-dimensional measurement of meaning through word co-occurrence context (Shaoul & Westbury, 2010), which has historically been applied to questions of semantic relationships between words. This method allows scholars to avoid pitfalls from previous assumptions and determine previously unknown ideological positions of previously unknown sources. We demonstrate the validity and range of this method and provide a series of best practices for scholars who wish to employ this tool in their own research. Our method will ultimately expand the variety of research questions available as well as improving inferences, opening up new lines of research for scholars studying media consumption and political behavior.

Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda: Constructing the War on Drugs, by Andrew B. Whitford and Jeff Yates

In the wake of the provocative work of George Edwards (2003), presidential scholars have sought to reevaluate the effectiveness of the bully pulpit. What was long accepted as stylized fact is now a hot topic, and one well worthy of study. Starting with Kernell’s seminal work Going Public, all too frequently scholars have assumed that presidents are able to influence others through use of the bully pulpit, yet have provided sparse empirical support for this claim. In Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda: Constructing the War on Drugs, Andrew B. Whitford and Jeff Yates utilize a clever research design to add an important dimension to this debate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the bully pulpit in a couple of unlikely ways. As we know from Kernell and others, presidents have made greater use of the bully pulpit in recent years, and rhetoric has changed in ways that reflect a more populist approach to governing. But does this matter? When presidents speak, do people listen? And do they change their behavior based on presidential priorities? The authors take a historical approach to examining the evolution of the war on drugs and demonstrate that presidents are able to change a variety of behaviors through the use of the bully pulpit, and among a variety of different actors that have largely been ignored. Whitford and Yates begin the book by applying Ingram and Schneider’s (1993) social construction theory to the war on drugs and presidential rhetoric, which is a welcome addition to the literature. Social construction is a way of characterizing populations that will be affected by a particular policy. These characterizations have normative and evaluative connotations and cast these different populations in either a positive light (i.e., hard-working, deserving) or a negative one (dishonest, undeserving). Social construction is understudied in the American context, but the application to the war on drugs is clear and well executed by the authors. Rhetoric surrounding drug enforcement becomes a perfect example of this theory, with politicians casting drug users in the role of deviants and children in the role of dependents. This allows politicians to prime the idea that by fighting the war on drugs, parents across America are able to keep their children safe. Politicians are cast in the role of heroes, providing protection for dependents while preventing and punishing deviant behavior. The authors assert that this theory not only shapes presidential rhetoric, but has shaped the development and outcomes of the war on drugs. The major development of this idea comes in Chapter 3, where the authors give a detailed account of the evolution of the war on drugs, starting in the middle of the 19th century with Pennsylvania’s ban on morphine and Ohio’s ban of cocaine use at the end of the century. The main thrust of the story, though, begins with Richard Nixon and the first use of the phrase “war on drugs” in 1972. Despite Nixon taking a relatively moderate stance