We are currently working on two major research projects, which are described in detail below.
European Political Information Environments in Times of Corona: A Comparative Two-Wave Survey in 17 Countries
Starting in 2019, NEPOCS fielded a comparative two-wave survey study in 17 countries to investigate the effects of different conditions of the political information environment on the opinions, attitudes, knowledge and behavior of citizens with regard to media and democracy. Dr. Laia Castro Herrero (University of Zurich & Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona), who contributes significantly to the success of the project, assists us in coordinating the complex design.
Among the 28,000 individuals surveyed, we found five news consumer profiles – news minimalists, social media news users, traditionalists, online news seekers, and hyper news consumers. We found that both traditional and online-based news diets are correlated with higher political knowledge. Not all European political information environments contribute equally to an informed citizenry.
We also investigated to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption. Based on our two-wave panel survey, we discovered an overall rise of news use across the 17 countries, mostly for TV, social media, and online news. In times of crises and an unusually strong ‘need for orientation’, people mainly turn to news sources that are easily available and offer immediate coverage. The rise in news use is mainly true for those who have high levels of trust in legacy media.
We further studied the relationship between platform use and conspiracy theory beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We theorized that some platforms are more fertile places for the spread of conspiracy beliefs than others. We find that Twitter has a negative effect on conspiracy beliefs whereas all other platforms under examination in our study are found to have a positive effect. However, for Facebook and its private messaging counterpart Messenger, these effects are only significant when country differences are not considered.
More analyses are currently conducted.
THREATPIE
Starting in 2020, our project THREATPIE: The Threats and Potentials of a Changing Political Information Environment examines how the current changes in the political information environments in European democracies affect the conditions for a healthy democracy. As a theoretical background we employ the concept of ‘political information environment’ (PIE) that includes both the supply and demand of political news and information. Supply refers to the quantity and quality of news and public affairs content provided through traditional and new media sources, demand captures the amount and type of news and information the public wants or consumes. Recent changes in the political information environment may lead to a growing number of uniformed, misinformed and selectively informed citizens, potentially endangering the functioning of democracy. To examine these concerns, the study aims at investigating the following:
- How do citizens today gain political information and how does this relate to their political attitudes and behaviour.
- What is the content and quality of the information citizens are exposed to.
- Where do divides between being informed and not being informed exist, across and within European societies.
- How can citizens be empowered to navigate and find valuable information.
We will do this through a series of comparative, innovatively designed studies, including web tracking, comparative surveys, focus groups and survey-embedded experiments in 14 European countries and the US. These countries vary on a number of key contextual factors relevant for the study, covering both “young” and established democracies with different democratic traditions, media systems, and news consumption habits.
Regular updates on the progress of this exciting NEPOCS project can be found on a separate website, which we dedicate entirely to our work on THREATPIE. Please visit threatpie.eu.