How entertainment media influence voting behavior –

As part of the APSA Public Scholarship Program, political science graduate students prepare summaries of new research for the American Political Science Review. This article, written by Dirck de Kleerreports on the new article by Eunji Kim and Shawn Patterson Jr., “The American Viewer: Political Consequences of the Entertainment Media.”

Americans watch a lot of television, an average of over four hours a day. It's no wonder, then, that political scientists have long studied the influence of the media on politics—from the effects of campaign advertising on voter turnout to the role of partisan media in polarization. However, the media that dominate research attention tend to be explicitly political. The idea that entertainment media can influence politics has often been met with skepticism. When they have been studied, it has usually been in the context of their substitution effect. However, Kim and Patterson challenge this view in their newly published paper. The American viewer (a title that pays tribute to the classic, The American voter). They argue that entertainment media offers unique opportunities for celebrities to build personal bonds with voters. When these nonpolitical actors run for office, they can leverage these parasocial bonds to appeal to voters.

The authors focus on perhaps the most vivid example of the influence of entertainment media on American politics – the rise of Donald Trump. Before running for office, Trump hosted the reality TV show The Apprentice for eleven years. The show, in which candidates competed for a prestigious opportunity to work for Trump, aired between 2003 and 2015 and attracted over 28 million viewers at its peak. It has long been a popular hypothesis among political pundits and journalists that Trump benefited from his reality TV brand. In fact, the authors show how frequently the mainstream news media relied on The Apprentice during the 2016 election cycle.

“Finally, '[I]”It is difficult to distinguish politics from entertainment, and the attempt is dangerous.” To systematically investigate whether and to what extent The Apprentice To improve Donald Trump's election chances, Kim and Patterson used two different data sources. First, they used Twitter data to determine that about 69% of NBC apprentice Account also followed Donald Trump, while only 12% followed Marco Rubio and 8% followed Ted Cruz. Second, they analyzed a survey of white voters conducted before the 2016 presidential election. The survey found that frequent viewers of The Apprentice showed higher support for Trump than non-viewers. In contrast, non-viewers who supported Trump tended to evaluate his campaign along more typical partisan lines. In addition, these voters mentioned Trump's personality traits (“much tougher,” “says what he thinks”) more often in open-ended responses than those who had never seen Trump. The Apprentice.

The authors go beyond simply showing correlations. To draw causal conclusions, they use the fact that in the early 2000s, before the advent of streaming services such as Netflix, many Americans tended to stay on the same channel all evening. In the 2004 television season, Thursdays The Apprentice (9pm) directly after the popular 8pm sitcoms Will and Grace And Joey. In other words, some people saw The Apprentice not because they had a strong affinity for the show or for Trump, but simply because they were watching a popular sitcom on NBC at 8 p.m. and didn't bother to change the channel. Using this “channel inertia” as a tool, Kim and Patterson show that entertainment media causally influenced Trump's vote share at the county level during the Republican primaries. However, they found no evidence of similar effects in the general election, where the power of partisan identity plays a much more significant role than in primaries, where such heuristics are absent, leading voters to rely more heavily on other considerations such as name recognition.

At a time when news consumption is declining worldwide, this study helps us better understand how supposedly apolitical media can strongly influence our politics. Because: “[I]It is difficult to distinguish politics from entertainment, and it would be dangerous to try.”