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The Role of Media Distrust in Partisan Voting

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Abstract

As an institution, the American news media have become highly unpopular in recent decades. Yet, we do not thoroughly understand the consequences of this unpopularity for mass political behavior. While several existing studies find that media trust moderates media effects, they do not examine the consequences of this for voting. This paper explores those consequences by analyzing voting behavior in the 2004 presidential election. It finds, consistent with most theories of persuasion and with studies of media effects in other contexts, that media distrust leads voters to discount campaign news and increasingly rely on their partisan predispositions as cues. This suggests that increasing aggregate levels of media distrust are an important source of greater partisan voting.

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Notes

  1. Television is excluded from the average in order to provide a clear comparison between the press and other institutions that are unlikely to be considered part of the news media.

  2. While not the focus of this paper, there is also a substantial literature examining the causes of these negative attitudes toward the news media (see for instance Christen et al. 2002; Fallows 1996; Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken 1993; Ladd 2010; Patterson 1993; Sabato 2000; Vallone et al. 1985).

  3. Some studies have had more success demonstrating economic effects on vote choice by pooling survey data over many years and using objective measures of economic performance rather than survey responses (Markus 1992; Zaller 2004). Unfortunately, questions probing attitudes toward the news media have not been asked over a sufficiently long time period to incorporate them into this type of analysis.

  4. For more on the role of source credibility in psychological research, see O’Keefe (2002, Chap. 8) and Perloff (2003, Chap. 6).

  5. This prediction can also be derived from a simple Bayesian decision-theoretic voting model (e.g. Achen 1992). Such a model is presented in Ladd (2006b).

  6. In 2000, the ANES used a split-mode design, with approximately half of respondents sampled by random digit dialing and interviewed by phone, and the other half selected by probability area sampling and interviewed in person. Reinterviews in 2002 and 2004 were conducted entirely by telephone. The American Association for Public Opinion Research’s official “RR1” response rate for the 2000 ANES is 61% (1,807 interviews out of a sample of 2,984). Of those 1,807 respondents, 1,187 were interviewed again in 2002 (a reinterview rate of 66%), with 840 of those interviewed again in 2004 (a reinterview rate of 71%). As this paper focuses on responses from 2002 and 2004, the relevant response rate corresponds to those who completed the entire panel. The RR1 response rate for the entire panel is 28% (840 out of an initial sample of 2,984). Panel data like these have the disadvantage of possibly introducing biases resulting from panel conditioning or panel attrition. While not settling the matter, existing scholarship is reassuring on this point, finding panel effects in the ANES to be small (Bartels 1999).

  7. Unlike many other ANES surveys, a short quiz of basic political facts is not included in the 2002 and 2004 waves of this panel survey. Instead, I measure knowledge with interviewer ratings of the respondents’ “general level of information about politics and public affairs.” Interviewer ratings are often used as substitutes when factual questions are not available (e.g. Bartels 1996) because they tend to be highly correlated (Zaller 1985).

  8. The negative association between media evaluations and partisan voting is present in a simple bivariate analysis as well. For instance, party voting occurs among 83.6% of those who rate the media at 70 degrees or higher and among 88.5% of those who rate the media at 30 degrees or lower, a difference of approximately 5 percentage points. This difference without controls has a p-value of 0.086. The inclusion of control variables somewhat increases the magnitude of the relationship, reducing the p-value.

  9. Measuring all explanatory variables several years prior to the election has the disadvantage of introducing more measurement error (i.e. random variation) into these variables, potentially reducing the model fit and increasing the standard errors. This is evident in the fact that these models fit the data more poorly, with pseudo R 2s of 0.15 rather than 0.24. This becomes a more serious problem if one tries to measure explanatory variables in 2000, four years prior to the election. This, plus the smaller sample size (less than 450), makes it impractical to use this approach. When such a model is estimated, the pseudo R 2 drops to 0.13, and the effect of media thermometer ratings is still negative but statistically insignificant.

  10. As the model in column 5 uses instrumental variables regression, it should be interpreted as a linear probability model (Aldrich and Nelson 1984), whose coefficients are not directly comparable in size to logit coefficients.

  11. For the models in columns 1, 2 and 3, the 95% confidence intervals on the marginal effects are 0.03–0.23, 0.05–0.36, and 0.05–0.35, respectively.

  12. I also checked for interactions between media evaluations and several other variables, including political knowledge and strength of partisanship, but found no evidence of heterogeneity in the effect.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Doug Arnold, Larry Bartels, Martin Gilens, Erika King, Gabriel Lenz, Skip Lupia, Tali Mendelberg and seminar participants at the University of Delaware, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Princeton University and Temple University for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. All remaining errors are my own.

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  1. Department of Government and Georgetown Public Policy Institute, Georgetown University, 3520 Prospect Street, NW, 4th Floor, 20007, Washington, DC, USA

    Jonathan McDonald Ladd

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Appendix

Appendix

Variables from GSS 1972–2008 Cumulative File

Confidence in the Press—conpress; Confidence in Major Companies—conbus; Confidence in Organized Religion—conclerg; Confidence in Education—coneduc; Confidence in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government—confed; Confidence in Organized Labor—conlabor; Confidence in Medicine—conmedic; Confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court—conjudge; Confidence in the Scientific Community—consci; Confidence in Congress—conlegis; Confidence in the Military—conarmy.

Variables from ANES 2000–2004 Panel Study

Vote Choice—P045003a; News Media Thermometer—P025073, P045041; Political Knowledge—P023155, P045202; Age—P023126x, P045193; Party Identification—P023038x, P045058x; Frequency of Following Government and Public Affairs—P025084, P045057; Frequency of Political Discussion—P025004, P045002; Campaign Television Viewing—P025002, P045001; Trust in Government—P025174, P045149; Trust in People—P025101, P045158; Internal Efficacy—P025173, P045148; External Efficacy—P025172, P045147; Preferences on Government Aid to the Poor—P025115x, P025115y, P045075x; Feminists Thermometer Rating—P025071, P045039; Blacks Thermometer Rating—P025055, P045023; Defense SpendingPreferences—P025114x, P045081; Ideological Self-Placement—P023024; Network News Exposure—P023002; Newspaper Exposure—P023004.

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Ladd, J.M. The Role of Media Distrust in Partisan Voting. Polit Behav 32, 567–585 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9123-z

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