ABSTRACT

What role does news content play in explaining inter-party hostility? We argue that affective polarization is influenced by exposure to one of the most dominant ways to cover politics: strategy coverage. While previous studies have pointed to the negative consequences of covering politicians’ strategies and campaign tactics, we find that this reporting style decreases out-party hostility. Our findings are based on two separate studies: (1) a survey experiment and (2) a cross-sectional analysis that increases external validity by combining survey data with computational content analysis of the articles respondents were exposed to by their primary news sources throughout the 2016 US presidential campaign (415,604 articles from 157 American news outlets). The results demonstrate that despite the wide criticism of the tendency of journalists to focus on political strategies, such coverage may ease inter-party tensions in American politics.

摘要

新闻内容在解释党际敌意方面起什么作用？我们认为，情感两极分化受到接触政治报道的最主要方式之一的影响：战略报道。虽然之前的研究已经指出报道政治家的策略和竞选策略的负面影响，但我们发现这种报道风格减少了党外的敌意。我们的发现基于两项独立的研究：(1) 一项调查实验和 (2) 一项横断面分析，该分析通过将调查数据与受访者在整个调查期间通过其主要新闻来源接触的文章的计算内容分析相结合来提高外部有效性。 2016 年美国总统竞选（来自 157 家美国新闻媒体的 415,604 篇文章）。