March 20, 2024
Populist Radical-Right Attitudes, Political Involvement and Selective Information Consumption: Who Tunes Out and Who Prefers Attitude-Consonant Information
This study seeks to understand how populist radical-right (PRR) attitudes and political involvement relate to individuals’ political information consumption and selective exposure to ideological content.
Abstract
The study approaches political information selection as a two-step phenomenon: first, individuals use different amounts of political information, and second, they rely on attitude-consonant information to different degrees. Results from a combination of survey measures, implicit association tests and automated text analysis of large-scale online tracking data collected in Germany and Switzerland in 2020 showed that first, political information consumption was related to political involvement but also to PRR attitudes—in different ways—in both countries. Second, our analyses revealed country variations regarding attitude-consonant online PRR exposure. Third, implicit PRR attitudes were not relevant in explaining the use of PRR content online. We discuss the relevance of moving beyond analyses of traditional news toward the breadth of political information consumption, country contexts, and naturalistic research designs.
To continue reading please visit: https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2024.2310156
This open access article was published in Mass Communication and Society on 20 March 2024.
Maier, M., Adam, S., Gil Lopez, T., Makhortykh, M., Bromme, L., Christner, C., … Urman, A. (2025). Populist Radical-Right Attitudes, Political Involvement and Selective Information Consumption: Who Tunes Out and Who Prefers Attitude-Consonant Information. Mass Communication and Society, 28(1), 101–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2024.2310156
Keywords: Political involvement, Populist Radical-Right Attitudes
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