Problem Description

Since years, we have experienced a shift from where, particularly young people, inform themselves about societal and political topics. More and more people use channels like social media instead of traditional newspapers. At the same time there is a tendency to polarize and more and more critique toward democracy can be observed.

Goal of the Thesis

This seminar paper will make use of a data set that has been gathered since years in the SOSEC project: https://www.socialsentiment.org/. Hundreds of people are repeatedly asked for their political sentiment and media channel usage. In this thesis you will get access to this data set, generate and explore hypotheses around the above described topic statistically. Relationships that might be of interest are about news channel usage and trust into sources and the general development of news channel usage over time. A challenge is the appropriate dealing with drop outs that might be found in the data set. In addition to this, literature on digital news consumption and political attitude has to be gathered and analyzed.

Requirements

• Familiarity with statistics, particularly repeated measurements and panel data analyses.

Sources

• Flaxman, S., Goel, S., & Rao, J. M. (2016). Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. Public opinion quarterly, 80(S1), 298-320.
• Jun, N. (2012). Contribution of Internet news use to reducing the influence of selective online exposure on political diversity. Computers in human behavior, 28(4), 1450-1457.
• Levy, R. E. (2021). Social media, news consumption, and polarization: Evidence from a field experiment. American economic review, 111(3), 831-870.
• Štětka, V., Mihelj, S., & Tóth, F. (2021). The impact of news consumption on anti-immigration attitudes and populist party support in a changing media ecology. Political Communication, 38(5), 539-560.