Reciprocal relations between populist radical-right attitudes and political information behavior: A longitudinal study of attitude development in high-choice information environments.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Michaela Maier
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413190151

Populist radical-right (PRR) parties turn more and more successful in Europe. Their success formula seems to lie in a combination of nationalism, authoritarianism and populism. First evidence suggests that this ideological package can also be found in citizens’ mind-sets. However, up to now, these attitudes have primarily been studied as separated concepts and measured explicitly. Beyond, when effects of these attitudes have been analyzed, the focus has been on party preferences and voting behavior.This project aims to make a fivefold contribution. First, PRR attitudes will be conceptualized and measured as a conjoint concept, both explicitly and implicitly, allowing us to identify segments of the population that might not vote for PRR parties yet hold variants of such attitudes. Second, we analyze how citizens’ PRR attitudes affect their use of political information, explaining which types of PRR citizens tend towards which “information diets” combining research on information avoidance and selective information seeking. Third, we examine how different types of PRR attitudes affect the processing of self-selected information diets and what impact this has on the further development of PRR attitudes (e.g. radicalization or weakening). Fourth, we shed light on moderators that we regard as crucial for understanding the reciprocal relationship between PRR attitudes and information behavior, namely political sophistication, country-contexts of social (un-)desirability of PRR ideas and strength of such voices, and the degree of political contestation. Fifth, we methodologically contribute to the state of research by tracking the political information usage on all issues and all freely available webpages and social media, thus going beyond the tracking of pre-defined sites. Following these five contributions to the existing research, the questions guiding our research are:1. Which types of PRR attitudes do citizens hold and how widely are these attitudes spread throughout the population of Switzerland and Germany?2. What types of political information usage do citizens with different PRR attitudes exhibit in these two countries?3. How do different types of PRR attitudes affect the processing of self-selected information diets taking into account varying degrees of political contestation and how does this impact the further development of PRR attitudes (only analyzed for Switzerland)? To tackle these questions, we combine survey data with a tracking of people’s on- and offline information usage and a systematic content analysis of the tracked information diets. For Switzerland, we conduct a three-wave panel survey and a two-wave tracking study allowing us to trace the development of PRR attitudes and to differentiate effects of different degrees of political contestation. To get insights into the role of country-specific variables we compare the Swiss data with a cross-sectional survey followed by one media usage tracking in Germany.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel, Switzerland, USA
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Rüdiger Grimm; Professor Dr. Manfred Schmitt
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Silke Adam; Shira Dvir-Gvirsman; Erik Tillman