"What Kind of Bias Do I Want?" How Cross-Pressured Voters Select Political Media

Lucas Paulo da Silva
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Lucas Paulo da Silva: Trinity College Dublin

No 6rxve_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Media selection is an important form of political behavior that often shapes public opinion and voting. While most people select like-minded media, recent evidence suggests that media markets do not represent the growing populations of cross-pressured voters (CPVs) with "mixed" ideological positions. CPVs consist of two groups: "left-conservatives" are economically leftist and culturally conservative, while "right-progressives" are the reverse. Since CPVs are under-represented by political media outlets, how do they select outlets and content? My theory draws on another type of political behavior -- voting -- and adapts the prominent spatial voting model to political media selection. Hence, I argue that salience shapes outlet selection. Moreover, within an outlet, both salience and outlet ideology influence content selection. I administer a pre-registered survey to British CPVs that simulates the media selection process with two experiments. This is supplemented by large-scale, representative panel data from the UK, US, and Germany. My results indicate that (1) CPVs usually select right-conservative outlets, (2) salience likely has some influence over content selection within outlets, and (3) outlet ideology has a powerful effect on content selection. However, surprisingly, salience might not drive the initial outlet selection process, pointing to new avenues for research. This study has important implications for selective exposure, media effects, public opinion, and voting behavior.

Date: 2026-03-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:6rxve_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/6rxve_v1

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