Sean J. Westwood

Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media Endorsements Trump Partisan Source Affiliation When Selecting News Online

Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet this ignores how the widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation. Building on existing models of news selectivity to emphasize information utility, we hypothesize that social media’s distinctive feature, social endorsements, trigger several decision heuristics that suggest utility. In two experiments, we demonstrate that stronger social endorsements increase the probability that people select content and that their presence reduces partisan selective exposure to levels indistinguishable from chance.

How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation

the district—affect how constituents allocate credit. Legislators use credit claiming messages to influence the expenditures they receive credit for and to affect how closely they are associated with spending in the district. Constituents are responsive to credit claiming messages—they build more support than other nonpartisan messages. But contrary to expectations from other studies, constituents are more responsive to the total number of messages sent rather than the amount claimed. Our results have broad implications for political representation, the personal vote, and the study of U.S. Congressional elections. P articularistic spending, a large literature argues, cultivates a personal vote for incumbents (Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987; Ferejohn 1974;LazarusandReiley2010;LevittandSnyder1997; Mayhew 1974). To build this support, legislators are assumed to direct projects and programs to their districts. Constituents, in turn, are thought to reward their legislator for the level of federal spending in the district (Levitt and Snyder 1997; Str¨ omberg 2004) or the

The Impression of Influence: Legislator Communication, Representation, and Democratic Accountability

List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii 1 Representation, Spending, and the Personal Vote 1 2 Solving the Representatives Problem and Creating the Representatives Opportunity 15 3 How Legislators Create an Impression of Influence 32 4 Creating an Impression, Not Just Increasing Name Recognition 64 5 Cultivating an Impression of Influence with Actions and Small Expenditures 81 6 Credit, Deception, and Institutional Design 121 7 Criticism and Credit: How Deficit Implications Undermine Credit Allocation 148 8 Representation and the Impression of Influence 174 9 Text as Data: Methods Appendix 186 Bibliography 189 Index 203

The Limits of Partisan Prejudice

Partisanship increasingly factors into the behavior of Americans in both political and nonpolitical situations, yet the bounds of partisan prejudice are largely unknown. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the limits of partisan prejudice using a series of five studies situated within a typology of prejudice. We find that partisan prejudice predicts suppression of hostile rhetoric toward one’s own party, avoidance of members of the opposition, and a desire for preferential treatment for one’s own party. While these behaviors may cause incidental or indirect harm to the opposition, we find that even the most affectively polarized—those with the strongest disdain for the opposition—are no more likely to intentionally harm the opposition than those with minimal levels of affective polarization.

Of course I wouldn't do that in real life: advancing the arguments for increasing realism in HCI experiments

We offer a nuanced examination of the way that realism can impact internal and external validity in HCI experiments. We show that if an HCI experiment lacks realism across any of four dimensions--appearance, content, task and setting--the lack of realism can confound the study by interacting with the treatment and weakening internal or external validity. We argue furthermore, that realism can be increased while still maintaining control: analogue experiments allow researchers to conduct experiments in more ecologically valid environments and online experiments bridge the gap between the cleanroom and field. While increasing the level of realism in an experiment can introduce noise, technological developments have made it easier to collect rich analytics on behavior and usage.

A Methodological Self-Study of Quantitizing Negotiating Meaning and Revealing Multiplicity

This inquiry developed during the process of “quantitizing” qualitative data the authors had gathered for a mixed methods curriculum efficacy study. Rather than providing the intended rigor to their data coding process, their use of an intercoder reliability metric prompted their investigation of the multiplicity and messiness that, as they suggest here, are inherent to work that crosses the epistemological boundaries of academic fields and research paradigms. Even as the authors developed a deeper understanding of—and appreciation for—the nature of quantitative rigor, they moved toward a more deeply constructivist view of the research process itself. Ultimately, the authors abandoned the neat study of intercoder reliability that they had envisioned and moved toward the present dialogic report to reveal and examine their process.

The Effects of Chronic Multitasking on Analytical Writing

Chronic multitaskers perform worse on core multitasking skills: memory management, cognitive filtering and task switching, likely due to their inability to filter irrelevant stimuli [17]. Our experiment examines effects of chronic multitasking with task-relevant and irrelevant distractors on analytical writing quality. We found a general switch cost and, when controlling for that cost, effects of chronic multitasking habits: heavy multitaskers write worse essays in the irrelevant condition and better essays in the relevant condition. Our study changes multitasking research paradigms in two fundamental ways: it studied a realistic writing scenario including access to both irrelevant and relevant distractors. We found that the effect of chronic multitasking is complex; heavy multitaskers are seduced by unrelated distractors but able to integrate multiple sources of relevant information.

The Role of Persuasion in Deliberative Opinion Change

How does discussion lead to opinion change during deliberation? I formulate and test hypotheses based on theories of persuasion, and examine them against other possible sources of deliberative opinion change. Through detailed analysis of a nationally representative deliberative event I create a full discussion network for each small group that deliberated by recording who said what, the argument quality for what was said, and to whom it was directed. I find that well-justified arguments made in the context of direct engagement between peers are a consistent predictor of opinion change. Individual-level persuasion, not knowledge-driven refinement or extremity, drives most opinion change. These results show that further deliberative research needs to account for persuasion when explaining deliberative opinion change.

The tie that divides: Cross-national evidence of the primacy of partyism

Using evidence from Great Britain, the United States, Belgium and Spain, it is demonstrated in this article that in integrated and divided nations alike, citizens are more strongly attached to political parties than to the social groups that the parties represent. In all four nations, partisans discriminate against their opponents to a degree that exceeds discrimination against members of religious, linguistic, ethnic or regional out-groups. This pattern holds even when social cleavages are intense and the basis for prolonged political conflict. Partisan animus is conditioned by ideological proximity; partisans are more distrusting of parties furthest from them in the ideological space. The effects of partisanship on trust are eroded when partisan and social ties collide. In closing, the article considers the reasons that give rise to the strength of ‘partyism’ in modern democracies.

How to Measure Public Opinion in the Networked Age: Working in a Googleocracy or a Googlearchy?

The rise of the internet has transformed information acquisition from a top-down process originating from media elites to a process of self-selection and searching. This raises a fundamental question about the relationship between information acquisition and opinion formation: do the processes occur in parallel or as part of a self-directed feedback loop? That is, do we look for information to make opinions, do we look for information to support our opinions, or do we do both simultaneously? Analysis using Google search results and polling information from the 2008 US presidential election suggests that public information queries are reflective of polling data and election outcomes. The sheer quantity of search data on political terms also suggests that public information desires may surpass standard assumptions of public political sophistication.