This study investigates the circumstances under which both identity- and utilitarian focused explanations of public EU support come into play. It is claimed that in particular the salience of relevant issues in the mass media environment... more
This study investigates the circumstances under which both identity- and utilitarian focused explanations of public EU support come into play. It is claimed that in particular the salience of relevant issues in the mass media environment conditions the impact of individual level explanatory factors. We test our assumptions within the German context, drawing on survey data collected between 1994 and 2006 (51 waves). Our findings show that news saliencies of immigration and economic issues moderate the effects of anti-immigration attitudes and economic evaluations respectively. The main findings show that when immigration is more salient in the news environment, the influence of immigration attitudes on European integration becomes significantly less negative. There was no moderating effect of economic news and individual-level hard factors, nor was there a significant interaction effect of individual factors with real-world indicators. We conclude that mediated information has a bigger impact on public opinion dynamics than real-world contextual changes.
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This study investigates the effects of news frames on public politicization (i.e., salience and polarization) and the moderating role of prior attitudes on this relationship. An experiment was set-up among a representative sample of the... more
This study investigates the effects of news frames on public politicization (i.e., salience and polarization) and the moderating role of prior attitudes on this relationship. An experiment was set-up among a representative sample of the Dutch population between June and July 2011. The results yield no significant direct framing effects, only when prior attitudes are taken into account significant framing effects become visible. Bigger incongruence between the tone of the message and individual attitudes causes a decrease in issue salience among the initially negative and an increase in among the initially positive through a mechanism of risk perception. Incongruence also yields significant change in line with the tone of the message among the initially negative, and insignificant changes among the positive. As the results largely depend upon prior attitudes, framing effects can either add or reduce politicization dependent on the composition of the population.
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This study investigates the circumstances under which both identity- and utilitarian focused explanations of public EU support come into play. It is claimed that in particular the salience of relevant issues in the mass media environment... more
This study investigates the circumstances under which both identity- and utilitarian focused explanations of public EU support come into play. It is claimed that in particular the salience of relevant issues in the mass media environment conditions the impact of individual level explanatory factors. We test our assumptions within the German context, drawing on survey data collected between 1994 and 2006 (51 waves). Our findings show that news saliencies of immigration and economic issues moderate the effects of anti-immigration attitudes and economic evaluations respectively. The main findings show that when immigration is more salient in the news environment, the influence of immigration attitudes on European integration becomes significantly less negative. There was no moderating effect of economic news and individual-level hard factors, nor was there a significant interaction effect of individual factors with real-world indicators. We conclude that mediated information has a bigger impact on public opinion dynamics than real-world contextual changes.
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This study provides a systematic investigation of party and candidate websites in five European countries: Germany, Romania, Hungary, The Netherlands and Great Britain. It examines three features of online political communication that are... more
This study provides a systematic investigation of party and candidate websites in five European countries: Germany, Romania, Hungary, The Netherlands and Great Britain. It examines three features of online political communication that are presented on political websites (interactivity, personalization and mobilization) and investigates to what extent country, party and website characteristics explain differences in usage of these features. In total, 61 websites and 416 pages in the five countries were subject to a systematic content analysis. The findings suggest that differences in country, party and individual characteristics do in fact explain the variation in levels of mobilization, interactivity and personalization used on political websites. In general, results show that the differences between countries may be less important; differences in the adoption of different functions may be best explained by also examining differences in party (e.g., party size) and website characteristics (e.g., individual vs. party website).
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While increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to news avoidance, there are only few studies taking the distinction between intentional and unintentional news avoidance into consideration, and none that has investigated the linkage... more
While increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to news avoidance, there are only few studies taking the distinction between intentional and unintentional news avoidance into consideration, and none that has investigated the linkage between the two types of news avoidance and knowledge about politics and society. To fill this void, this study explores this relationship while distinguishing between knowledge related to uncontested issues and knowledge related to issues that have been subject to public controversies (climate change, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, crime, and immigration). Relying on a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens conducted in 2020 ( N = 2,160), we find that the relationship with patterns of news use is substantially different across these types of beliefs. Among other things, the results suggest that knowledge of uncontested issue domains is positively related to news use, but knowledge of contested issue domains is not. The intentional...
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Reduced edition for public use. Full edition available for scientific use. The corona crisis has fundamentally changed the everyday life in Austria as well as in many other countries. However, people are affected in very different ways.... more
Reduced edition for public use. Full edition available for scientific use. The corona crisis has fundamentally changed the everyday life in Austria as well as in many other countries. However, people are affected in very different ways. Against this background, the Corona Panel Study aims to provide an overview of various health, economic and social aspects of the corona crisis.
Variable identifiers and descriptions - machine-readable German
Core data file - STATA format - 3615 Variables, 6624 Observations - English
We explore mediated representations of parties' campaign interactions in multi-party systems. Actors in multi-party systems can engage with different actors on multiple issues. One crucial aspect of such engagement is the element of... more
We explore mediated representations of parties' campaign interactions in multi-party systems. Actors in multi-party systems can engage with different actors on multiple issues. One crucial aspect of such engagement is the element of negativity -- voicing criticisms of other actors' actions and policy proposals. This contribution argues that the media systematically exaggerate patterns of negativity based on issue ownership structures, such that attacks originating from or targeting issue owners are significantly more likely to be covered. We analyze a broad sample of news content from the 2013 Austrian national election campaign with Generalized Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to capture the complexities of mediated campaign negativity in a multi-party system while controlling for non-mediated campaign negativity. The results show that issue owners are more likely to be featured as attackers and targets in owned policy domains, suggesting a violation of the normative...
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While news media are frequently criticized for their alleged increasing reliance on ‘subsidized content’ provided by sources and news agencies, this claim is seldom empirically verified. Based on insights from computer science, this study... more
While news media are frequently criticized for their alleged increasing reliance on ‘subsidized content’ provided by sources and news agencies, this claim is seldom empirically verified. Based on insights from computer science, this study proposes an approach to quantitatively compare source, news agency and newspaper content over time. Including press releases from two corporate actors and one nongovernmental actor as well as articles of news agencies and newspapers, the approach is applied to the debate about nuclear energy in the Netherlands (2003–2012). Results show no indication of an increased similarity of newspapers’ content with either source content or news agency content, thus providing no justification for the concerns about an increasing dependency of newspapers on subsidized content. Contradicting literature, we found that media content is most similar to the nongovernmental organization’s content, with the exception of one regional newspaper that strongly reflects the...
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Full edition for scientific use. The AUTNES Online Panel Study 2017–2019 is a thirteen-wave panel that focuses on the Austrian National Parliamentary Election held on 15 October 2017 and 29 September 2019. This survey is part of the... more
Full edition for scientific use. The AUTNES Online Panel Study 2017–2019 is a thirteen-wave panel that focuses on the Austrian National Parliamentary Election held on 15 October 2017 and 29 September 2019. This survey is part of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES).
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Die Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) ist eine weltweite Kooperation von Wahlforschern. Teilnehmende Länder implementieren einen einheitlichen Fragenkomplex in ihre Nachwahlstudien. Die erhoben Daten umfassen das individuelle... more
Die Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) ist eine weltweite Kooperation von Wahlforschern. Teilnehmende Länder implementieren einen einheitlichen Fragenkomplex in ihre Nachwahlstudien. Die erhoben Daten umfassen das individuelle Wahlverhalten, politische Einstellungen und sozio-demographische Merkmale sowie Angaben zu den Wahlbezirken, den nationalen Wahlergebnissen und dem nationalen politischen System. Die einzelnen Länderstudien werden in einen gemeinsamen Datensatz integriert und stehen der Wissenschaft für vergleichende und länderübergreifende Untersuchungen frei zur Verfügung. Das CSES-Projekt konzentriert sich auf das Verhalten und die Einstellungen von Befragten während einer nationalen Wahl, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf Abstimmung und Wahlbeteiligung liegt. Jedes CSES-Modul besteht aus einer national-repräsentativen Umfrage nach den Wahlen und zusätzlichen Variablen über den Kontext des Landes und des Wahlsystems, in dem sich die Befragten befinden. Alle fünf Jahre wi...
Replication data and code for 'How do executives communicate about crises? A framework for comparative analysis'; paper accepted for publication with European Journal of Political Research.
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List of variables in waves 1-13 (zipped Excel.xlsx)
Core data file - STATA format - 1433 Variables, 4453 Observations - English
Variable identifiers and descriptions - machine-readable German
Variable identifiers and descriptions - machine-readable English
Core data file - STATA format - 118 Variables, 1203 Observations - English
Full edition for scientific use. The corona crisis has fundamentally changed the everyday life in Austria as well as in many other countries. However, people are affected in very different ways. Against this background, the Corona Panel... more
Full edition for scientific use. The corona crisis has fundamentally changed the everyday life in Austria as well as in many other countries. However, people are affected in very different ways. Against this background, the Corona Panel Study aims to provide an overview of various health, economic and social aspects of the corona crisis.
Representative democracy requires that citizens express informed political opinions, and in order to inform their opinions, they must have the opportunity to acquire relevant facts from the media. In view of increasing audience... more
Representative democracy requires that citizens express informed political opinions, and in order to inform their opinions, they must have the opportunity to acquire relevant facts from the media. In view of increasing audience segmentation, such opportunity may vary according to how widely political information diffuses across the various sources available in a media environment. However, it remains uncertain how differences in information saturation correspond with differences in information acquisition. Drawing on data from a rolling cross-sectional survey with nearly 60 waves and media content analyses spanning four European countries, this article examines whether a wider availability of information in collective media environments facilitates acquisition of such information. It also specifies the conditions under which this effect differs for people with different levels of learning motivation. Using a multilevel model, we find the media environment to be a remarkably powerful...
Forschungsdesigns erfordern Flexibilitat. Wichtig ist aber, dass Anpassungen nicht immer ausschlieslich mit Nachteilen verbunden sein mussen. In dieser Forschungsnotiz mochten wir unsere Uberlegungen zu den Auswirkungen von COVID-19 auf... more
Forschungsdesigns erfordern Flexibilitat. Wichtig ist aber, dass Anpassungen nicht immer ausschlieslich mit Nachteilen verbunden sein mussen. In dieser Forschungsnotiz mochten wir unsere Uberlegungen zu den Auswirkungen von COVID-19 auf die Durchfuhrung von qualitativen Interviews mit irregularen Migrant*innen veranschaulichen. Die Ausfuhrungen wurden in Anlehnung an eines unserer eigenen Projekte entwickelt, bei dem sich die Feldarbeit derzeit in der Planungsphase befindet. Aufgrund ihrer moglichen Relevanz fur ahnliche Projekte mochten wir unsere methodischen Uberlegungen teilen. Wir liefern Anmerkungen zur aktuellen Situation irregularer Migrant*innen in verschiedenen (europaischen) Landern sowie eine Einschatzung der methodischen Durchfuhrbarkeit von qualitativen Face-to-Face-Interviews mit irregularen Migrant*innen und moglicher Alternativen zu dieser Methode (insbesondere verschiedener Formen von Ferninterviews). Abschliesend kommen wir auf unsere Entscheidung zu sprechen, mit...
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Full edition for scientific use. This dataset contains political preferences of Austrian citizens eligible to vote (age 16 and older) after the national parliamentary election on 29.9.2013. Telephone interviews (CATI) were conducted in... more
Full edition for scientific use. This dataset contains political preferences of Austrian citizens eligible to vote (age 16 and older) after the national parliamentary election on 29.9.2013. Telephone interviews (CATI) were conducted in the period 1.10. – 29.10.2013. 1000 respondents were selected based on proportionally stratified probability sampling. This survey is part of the international Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Important variables are, among others, participation in the election and vote choice; preferences concerning raising/cutting public expenditure in certain policy areas; party closeness; party preferences and party identification; satisfaction with democracy; self- and party-placements on a left-right scale; political participation; perception of campaign ads; and political knowledge. Additional variables capture demographics, weights, and interview ratings.
Research Interests: Media Studies, Journalism, Political Science, Digital Journalism, Social Media, and 11 moreJournalism Studies, Journalism And Mass communication, News Media, Disinformation, Misinformation, Sociology of Journalism, Journalism and communication, Mainstream, Fake News, Fake News Phenomenon, and Social Media and Fake News/Propaganda
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Discrimination against Roma is a reality across Europe. The extent to which stereotyped, discriminatory beliefs of this minority group are reflected or reinforced by news media has received only limited attention. This study investigates... more
Discrimination against Roma is a reality across Europe. The extent to which stereotyped, discriminatory beliefs of this minority group are reflected or reinforced by news media has received only limited attention. This study investigates media framing of Roma and explains variation in how European news media frame Roma in diagnostic and prognostic terms. We content analysed 825 news articles from newspapers in the Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom for the period 2010–2012. Results show that attention for Roma is clustered around key-events and differs considerably between countries. Our analyses of frame variation, based on multilevel modelling, indicate a duality in the use of frames, with Roma being both portrayed as victims and perpetrators. Variation in these portrayals could be ascribed mainly to sources and newspaper types. This study contributes to our understanding of the factors that account for problem-emphasizing portrayals of Roma ...
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Religion can affect public support for the European Union (EU). However, specifying the circumstances under which religion may become a stronger predictor of EU-support has so far been neglected. This article shows that the media play a... more
Religion can affect public support for the European Union (EU). However, specifying the circumstances under which religion may become a stronger predictor of EU-support has so far been neglected. This article shows that the media play a role in this process and it is investigated to what extent the presence or absence of references to religious issues in EU news coverage primes people's religious attitudes to contribute to their evaluation of the EU. For this purpose, a content analysis of the amount of religious news items in EU coverage in German and Dutch newspapers between 1997 and 2007 was conducted. Two points in time were chosen — 1998, when only a small amount of religious news items appeared in EU coverage, and 2005, when religious items reached a peak. Eurobarometer data were used to test the media priming proposition. The findings show that an increasing religious dimension in media coverage about the EU primes a linkage between religious and political considerations ...
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Research Interests: Business and Perception
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Empirical research on the differences between digital and print reading has recently increased, mainly concentrating on informational texts while disregarding literary texts. Concerning narrative fiction, the existing quantitative studies... more
Empirical research on the differences between digital and print reading has recently increased, mainly concentrating on informational texts while disregarding literary texts. Concerning narrative fiction, the existing quantitative studies have found no or very few differences between reading printed books and e-books. In our focus group study, we amplify the perspective on digital and print book reading through a largely explorative approach. The results gained by interviewing 34 habitual readers of e-books in six groups show that e-books complement rather than replace printed books. Crucial differences can be found in the dimensions of the reading situation, genre selection, purpose of reading, as well as literary quality and status of the text. Furthermore, our results shed new light on the importance of the printed book as an individual material object, with its own specific iconicity and with notable consequences for intellectual possession, memory, and remembrance of read books and lived reading experiences.
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This study investigates how interactive infographics affect individuals’ understanding of news. We conducted a survey experiment (N = 293) to isolate the effects of a clickable graph and a slider graph on memory of the interactive... more
This study investigates how interactive infographics affect individuals’ understanding of news. We conducted a survey experiment (N = 293) to isolate the effects of a clickable graph and a slider graph on memory of the interactive graphical content and the surrounding text-based content, respectively. Moreover, to shed light on the underlying mechanisms linking interactive infographics with individuals’ cognitive responses en route to learning, we test a model with interface assessment, absorption, and elaboration as key mediators of information acquisition. Overall, the findings point to a negative impact of interactive infographics on news consumers’ memory. However, allowing users to interact with information displayed in graphics cannot be expected to uniformly affect the learning process; instead, the impact of interactive visual content depends on how the use of specific interactive modalities initiates both affective and cognitive processes in audiences when reading online news.
Language is of major importance in communicating politics to the people. Political texts, however, vary in their use of language beyond their particular contents. Some texts are structurally and linguistically more complex than others.... more
Language is of major importance in communicating politics to the people. Political texts, however, vary in their use of language beyond their particular contents. Some texts are structurally and linguistically more complex than others. Text complexity, in turn, has an impact on audiences’ abilities to process and acquire information. Yet, the measures used to operationalize textual complexity are vastly different across studies. This study analyzes whether various complexity metrics measure similar underlying constructs and develops an approach to determine the complexity of texts. The current article provides evidence that text complexity is a multidimensional construct and thus should be studied more carefully. It subsequently validates this approach by applying it to a sample of political newspaper articles. The approach should inform future studies on the structure and effects of linguistic complexity on political communication and beyond.
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While it is generally acknowledged that news agencies play a pivotal role in the current news landscape, empirical insights into the extent of news media’s reliance on agency copy are scarce. This study applies an innovative automated... more
While it is generally acknowledged that news agencies play a pivotal role in the current news landscape, empirical insights into the extent of news media’s reliance on agency copy are scarce. This study applies an innovative automated approach to trace agency copy for an entire year ( n = 119,452) in the major print and online news media articles ( n = 247,161) of the Dutch news landscape. Results suggest that particularly online news is highly dependent on agency content, with the agency being responsible for up to 75% of the online news articles. Furthermore, a large part of the online news consists of verbatim agency copy, involving little or no editing. The results provide a strong rationale to place news agencies high on the agenda of news production scholars. Moreover, the demonstrated agency domination of online news is alarming in the context of news diversity.
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Public attitudes towards the European Union (EU) are at the heart of a growing body of research. The nature, structure and antecedents of these attitudes, however, are in need of conceptual and empirical refinement. With growing... more
Public attitudes towards the European Union (EU) are at the heart of a growing body of research. The nature, structure and antecedents of these attitudes, however, are in need of conceptual and empirical refinement. With growing diversification of the policies of the Union, a one-dimensional approach to attitudes towards the EU may be insufficient. This study reviews existing approaches towards theorizing EU public opinion. Based on this inventory, originally collected public opinion survey data (n1⁄4 1394) indicate the presence of five dimensions of EU attitudes: performance, identity, affection, utilitarianism and strengthening. The study furthermore shows that different predictors of EU public opinion matter to differing extents when explaining these dimensions. In light of these findings, we suggest tightening the link, conceptually and empirically, between attitudinal dimensions and their antecedents.