Meital Balmas

Two routes to personalized politics Centralized and decentralized personalization

This article describes two opposing types of political personalization: centralizing and decentralizing personalization. The first implies the centralization of political power in the hands of a few leaders, while the latter indicates a diffusion of group power among its components: individual politicians. We start by proposing definitions of the types and subtypes of centralized and decentralized personalization and review the literature in search of evidence of their occurrence. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed typology by examining personalization trends in various aspects of Israeli politics and conclude with a discussion of the challenges that personalization set for liberal democracies.

When Fake News Becomes Real Combined Exposure to Multiple News Sources and Political Attitudes of Inefficacy, Alienation, and Cynicism

This research assesses possible associations between viewing fake news (i.e., political satire) and attitudes of inefficacy, alienation, and cynicism toward political candidates. Using survey data collected during the 2006 Israeli election campaign, the study provides evidence for an indirect positive effect of fake news viewing in fostering the feelings of inefficacy, alienation, and cynicism, through the mediator variable of perceived realism of fake news. Within this process, hard news viewing serves as a moderator of the association between viewing fake news and their perceived realism. It was also demonstrated that perceived realism of fake news is stronger among individuals with high exposure to fake news and low exposure to hard news than among those with high exposure to both fake and hard news. Overall, this study contributes to the scientific knowledge regarding the influence of the interaction between various types of media use on political effects.

Bad News or Mad News? Sentiment Scoring of Negativity, Fear, and Anger in News Content

This article examines the prevalence and nature of negativity in news content. Using dictionary-based sentiment analysis, we examine roughly fifty-five thousand front-page news stories, comparing four different affect lexicons, one for general negativity, and three capturing different measures of fear and anger. We show that fear and anger are distinct measures that capture different sentiments. It may therefore be possible to separate out fear and anger in media content, as in psychology. We also find that negativity is more strongly related to anger than to fear for each measure. This result appears to be driven by a small number of foreign policy words in the anger dictionaries, rather than an indication that negativity in U.S. coverage reflects “anger.” We highlight the importance of tailoring lexicons to domains to improve construct validity when conducting dictionary-based automation. Finally, we connect these results to existing work on the impact of emotion on political preferences and reasoning.

Charismatic Leaders and Mediated Personalization in the International Arena

A big data analysis of six countries has demonstrated that Western news media focus increasingly on foreign leaders, at the expense of their respective countries—a process termed here as mediated political personalization in the international arena. Important variations found across the countries in the sample are attributed to differences in media systems, media values, and the level of development of communication technologies. However, for the first time, it was shown that the personalization process is not deterministic; rather, it is affected by leaders’ personal qualities, particularly those that are aligned with the values of prevalent media logic. Thus, the election of a leader endowed with strong charisma accelerates the process of personalization in the coverage of his or her country in the foreign media. Data were obtained from a large corpus comprising more than 800,000 news items spanning two to three past decades, subjected to a computerized content analysis.

Bad News: The Changing Coverage of National Leaders in Foreign Media of Western Democracies

This is a study on international news flow based on a computerized analysis of foreign news coverage of national leaders in seven liberal democracies (Canada, Germany, France, Israel, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S.), encompassing a period of 30 years (N = 266,177). The results attest to a longitudinal trend in the coverage of foreign leaders in the political media of three countries—Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.: the tone is becoming increasingly negative. Two main factors account for these variations. The first is the level of political personalization in foreign coverage: Greater focus on foreign leaders is positively associated with increasing negativity toward these leaders. The second factor relates to proximity between countries: Negativity was found to be inversely and significantly associated with value and geographic proximity and to be inversely associated, with marginal significance, with political and economic proximity.