Authors
Bruce Bimber, Julien Labarre, Daniel Gomez, Ilia Nikiforov, Karolina Koc-Michalska
Publication date
2024/5/22
Journal
The International Journal of Press/Politics
Pages
19401612241253455
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
We take two approaches to understanding democratically corrosive sentiment (DCS) in the US, which we operationalize in terms of populist attitudes, conspiracy beliefs, and expectation of fraud in the next election. Our first approach is media use, which is not well understood as a correlate of DCS beyond generalities about the harms of social media and partisan news. We distinguish between mainstream news and right-wing media, and between three categories of social media: those facilitating stronger ties among users, those facilitating weaker ties, and extremist Alt-Tech brands. Our second approach to explaining DCS is attitudinal. For this, we introduce a concept called Feelings of Being Devalued (FBD), which we offer as a complement to status threat and sense of material deprivation. Using a survey of our design (N = 2,000) fielded in the US in 2022, we show that: (1) mainstream news use and attention …
Scholar articles
B Bimber, J Labarre, D Gomez, I Nikiforov… - The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2024