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News and Political Entertainment Effects on Democratic Citizenship

Patricia Moy, Michael A. Xenos, and Muzammil M. Hussain

Manifestations of Democratic Citizenship

Driven by strong concerns about the state of democracy, political communication researchers consistently tackle a vast array of questions related to citizens' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. How do individuals understand and feel about issues in the world? To what extent and in what venues do citizens express their opinions? Under what circumstances do they come to take action about problems in their community? The thrust of these intellectual undertakings relates to the role that communication plays in helping individuals to be knowledgeable and active citizens. An examination of findings from the last three quarters of a century reveals an increasingly nuanced set of relationships. No longer are large numbers of audience members influenced homogeneously by a few media messages. Rather, changes on a number of fronts – namely, the balkanization of media outlets, the fragmentation of content, and the growing recognition that individuals have certain predispositions that interact with message content – have necessitated another scrutinization of media effects on democratic citizenship.

Against this backdrop, we explore how citizens' use of contemporary media shapes their political behaviors. We are interested in the effects of individuals' consumption of not only traditional news sources, but also entertainment content that can have a political impact. Exemplified by The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show with David Letterman, and skits that appear on Saturday Night Live, such content – which we refer to here as “political entertainment” or “political comedy” – has not only proliferated, but also witnessed a steady growth in viewership. With mass audiences turning more and more to such content for information about public affairs, elections, and other aspects of the political world (Brewer & Cao, 2008), scholars have been motivated to revisit the extent to which political entertainment shapes citizens' behaviors.

This chapter begins with an explication of key concepts that occupy a unique space in the political communication literature – voter turnout, political participation, civic engagement, and political conversation – and how these behaviors are shaped by traditional news media outlets. After a brief introduction to the newer forms of political entertainment content that exist today, we identify their effects on political behavior as well, focusing on some key mechanisms of influence. Our conclusions highlight a few fruitful areas of research that merit attention as we seek to enhance our understanding of how both traditional and non-traditional media bear upon political life.

Studies of citizen behavior are motivated by the desire to better understand and enhance democratic life. After all, democratic theory is predicated on the assumption that citizens possess adequate and equal opportunity to express their preferences, argue for their self-interests, and participate in the decision-making process (Dahl, 1989). Simply put, citizen engagement in politics lies at the heart of democracy – and studies of political communication. However, ascertaining the extent to which citizens are engaged in politics is muddied by scholars' differing approaches of what constitutes “political.” Scholars initially equated political engagement with political participation, most commonly reflected in behaviors that include voting, contacting elected officials, and taking part in protests or demonstrations. These acts initially were differentiated based on how easy or difficult citizens found them to perform (Milbrath, 1965). Subsequent research on political participation, however, moved away from this unidimensional view to identify four activity clusters: (1) voting; (2) electoral campaign activity (e.g., persuading others how to vote, attending political rallies, and contributing money to a party or candidate); (3) cooperative activity, such as forming a group to solve a problem; and (4) citizen-initiated contacts, such as writing a letter to an elected official (Verba & Nie, 1972; Verba, Schlozman, & Brady 1995). With few exceptions then, political participation traditionally has referred to citizens' actions reflecting a vertical (upward) communication from citizens to political institutions and elites (Moy & Hussain, 2011).

Any focus on behavioral manifestations of political engagement will identify voting as a key participatory act, traditionally viewed as “the entry-level stage of involvement” (Crotty, 1991, pp. 20/21). Concern with voting stems from the fact that it legitimizes the system (Niemi & Weisberg, 1993), and despite varying levels of turnout in the past several decades, is the most widespread form of political participation. While it may be the most widespread and egalitarian form of political participation, voting is also the act that conveys the least amount of information (Verba et al., 1995). If political participation were to be explicated based on the level of information each act conveys, then voting would rank quite low on this scale. After all, knowing that a citizen cast a vote or how he or she voted sheds no light on the motivation behind the vote. Voting, in other words, allows the politician minimal insight into the concerns of the electorate. Other forms of political participation, however, have the potential to convey considerably more information; for example, contacting a public official allows one to not only express concern for a specific issue, but also communicate the direction and intensity of opinion about that issue.

Like voting and other forms of political participation, civic participation affords citizens the opportunity to communicate concerns about their self-interests and the well-being of the group or community to which they belong. Civic participation refers to the horizontal communication between citizens to bring about improvement in their communities. Such participation is motivated by the desire to work toward a public good, but often involves interacting with others and typically does not involve electoral politics (Zukin, Keeter, Andolina, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006). Studies of civic participation have operationalized the concept to include volunteering in the community, giving to a community charity, attending town hall meetings and discussing the needs of the community, and working on a community project (see Moy & Hussain, 2011, for a review).

With its emphasis on horizontal communication, the concept of civic participation often has been viewed in the same light as civic engagement, which includes citizens' non-political activities as well as their sense of belonging to and trust in the ability of the community to mobilize and resolve collective problems (Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006). Similarly, social capital concerns citizens' relations to each other and how they work together effectively to meet shared goals (Coleman, 1990; Putnam, 1995a). Scholars have identified social capital as having two dimensions: social trust (or trust in others) and social connectedness (sometimes called “civic engagement”), reflecting the extent to which citizens connect with their communities (Putnam, 1995b). These connections typically tend to be measured by the number of civic associations to which one belongs, but scholarly debates over the operationalization of this concept have raised questions regarding how best to capture informal community participation (see Moy, Scheufele, & Holbert, 1999 for a review). Regardless of the indicators employed, there is a general consensus that networks of civic engagement cultivate social trust, which in turn facilitates the ability of citizens to work collectively.

In many ways, the common threads between concepts like civic participation, civic engagement, and social capital reflect a larger trend in political communication research. Recent years have witnessed a resurgent interest in studying how citizens interact with each other to form individual opinions and achieve common goals. These interactions come in various guises, as noted earlier, but all involve some form of political talk. Indeed, if voting is the form of political engagement that conveys the least amount of information, interpersonal discussion of politics with others falls at the other end of the spectrum. As a communicative act, political discussion or deliberation allows citizens to express detailed information about their interests. It also helps citizens form high-quality political opinions (Cappella, Price, & Nir, 2002; Gastil & Dillard, 1999) as well as social identities that enable them to think collectively through political issues (Walsh, 2004). In the context of national political campaigns, political talk generally serves to “filter [...] information from the macro political environment” in beneficial ways (Pan, Shen, Paek, & Sun, 2006, p. 317). Not surprisingly then, political talk has come to figure prominently in contemporary research on media and democratic citizenship. After all, interpersonal discussion of politics is linked to participation in public forums and other forms of political engagement (Kim, Wyatt, & Katz, 1999; Knoke, 1990; Leighley, 1990; McLeod, Scheufele, & Moy, 1999). Indeed, the absence of regular and meaningful deliberation can lead to political alienation, not to mention poor public policy (Moy & Gastil, 2006).

What constitutes meaningful deliberation? With its Aristotelian roots, face-to-face conversation may be at the heart of democracy, but contemporary scholars believe that not all talk is equal. On the one hand, sociable conversation occurs with like-minded others and has no real goals. Problem-solving conversation, on the other hand, is more democratic; it often involves non-like-minded others and is public in nature. In this model of conversation, the act of speaking to others is a means to the end of good government, which presumably focuses on the common good (Schudson, 1997). Regardless of whether the deliberation occurs in formal town hall meetings, semi-structured online chat rooms, or informal interpersonal settings, the study of political talk reflects an emphasis on horizontal communication between citizens that can shape participants' understanding of public good, their understanding of the issues involved, and perhaps policy.

Effects of Traditional News Media

Efforts to map the influence of “traditional” news media on various forms of political participation and civic engagement have generated relatively consistent findings, despite different conceptualizations and methods adopted by scholars. Of course, to define a medium or outlet as long-standing is a moving target. By “traditional,” we refer to newspapers and television, the two media that have provided news about public affairs and the political world and have captured the attention of virtually all scholars interested in media influences on the aforementioned forms of citizenship. And although the Internet has not existed for as long as the other two media, it does serve the critical function of keeping the public informed about current affairs, especially as traditional news organizations have moved online to reach potential audiences every minute of the day.

Just as citizenship can be operationalized in numerous ways, scholars have taken different approaches to the study of media use. Survey measures of the concept, which provide the basis for most of the research in this area, have tapped respondents' exposure to a given medium (e.g., the number of days one reads a newspaper or the number of hours one watched television the previous night), attention to specific content (e.g., international news), and motivation to use that given medium (e.g., how often one uses the Internet to learn about community events). In addition, research study designs vary greatly. Some opt for experiments employing media-based stimulus materials that differ in content (e.g., newspaper campaign coverage that is oriented primarily toward policy stances vs. campaigning strategies), while others rely on cross-sectional survey data. Such theoretical and methodological inconsistencies may generate differences in findings.

Mass media use – in particular, exposure and attention to public affairs content – tends to be positively related to political activity that defines citizenship. Such use typically enhances the likelihood of engaging in electoral and campaign-related behaviors (McLeod & McDonald, 1985; McLeod et al., 1996) as well as civically oriented acts (Moy, Manosevitch, Stamm, & Dunsmore, 2005). The mechanisms underlying these relationships may differ, however.

Newspapers

In the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville (1884) theorized that newspapers promoted civic engagement in the United States. A century later, cross-medium comparisons sustained this conclusion, typically painting newspapers in a better light than television. This is true of the earliest research relating use of the two media to the likelihood of voting. “When practiced jointly, newspaper reading and television watching are associated with very high rates of turnout, but television may ‘add’ less to the combination than newspapers” (Glaser, 1965, p. 85). In the first two decades when television appeared on the media landscape, between 1960 and 1976, turnout declined only 1.5% for those most reliant on newspapers, compared to over 10% for those least reliant on newspapers (Shaffer, 1981). And data from the Center for Political Studies reveal that of the most politically apathetic, nearly three-quarters (74.8%) reported television to be the medium they used most often; the corresponding figure among the most politically involved was 58.9% (Bennett, 1986). Positive relationships between newspaper use and citizenship continue to emerge: Newspaper reading tends to be associated with higher levels of civic engagement (Shah, Cho, Eveland, & Kwak, 2005), voting (Wilkins, 2000) or the intent to vote (Drew & Weaver, 2006), and political conversation (Kim, Wyatt, & Katz, 1999).

These positive effects are not only direct effects, but also can involve different mechanisms of influence. Reading newspapers can increase what citizens know about politics (Robinson & Levy, 1986, 1998), and increased knowledge is associated with greater political activity (Bennett, 1986; McLeod et al., 1999). Newspaper reading also imparts information as to how citizens can actually participate (Lemert, 1981), which in turn can increase the likelihood of partaking of traditional acts of participation. Citizens who read newspapers also tend to become more integrated into their communities, which in turn increases their level of investment in seeing that local problems get resolved (Stamm, 1985). In addition, newspaper reading can facilitate unintended political discussion (Chaffee & Mutz, 1988) that can interest less engaged citizens. In general, those who discuss public affairs issues within their social networks experience differential gains; that is, these individuals are more likely to participate than those who engage in either newspaper reading or political talk alone (Scheufele, 2002).

Television

Unlike the relationship between newspaper reading and political behavior, watching television news tends to elicit more negative associations. Moreover, that the effects tend to be mixed may stem from the use of different measures and/or the range of content available through this medium. For example, watching campaign news on television has been negatively related to the likelihood of voting and other forms of conventional political participation (McLeod et al., 1996). However, exposure and attention to national and international news on television has not been related to either voting or political participation (Eveland & Scheufele, 2000). Yet other research has found that watching “hard” or serious news on television correlates positively with participation in formal electoral politics (e.g., voting and belonging to political parties; Wilkins, 2000). The effects of watching televised news can be positively related to political participation: This type of media consumption translates directly into greater attendance at political meetings, contacting public officials, working on campaigns, and writing letters to the editor (Scheufele, Nisbet, Brossard, & Nisbet, 2004). Thus, although the evidence is far less conclusive than for newspapers, the bulk of the literature suggests television news can facilitate various forms of political participation, particularly when the content is germane and viewers' attention is sufficient.

Like newspaper reading, watching television news equips citizens with knowledge regarding current events, policy issues, and political actors; armed with this knowledge and information, citizens are more likely to engage in political action. As well, the very nature of the medium allows television news viewing to facilitate political action. With its reliance on visual cues, broadcast stories often involve compelling visuals and sound bites that generate political interest, another commonly identified antecedent to engagement in political activity. Visuals may also have more powerful effects in the long run as individuals learn to process visual cues before they learn to process verbal cues, and thus audiovisual cues can reach a much broader audience, starting at a much younger age (Graber, 1996). While print media are deemed superior in terms of the amount of political information they convey to audience members, newspaper stories have grown longer and increasingly oriented toward analysis and interpretation (Barnhurst & Mutz, 1997), some of which may be beyond the level of understanding and interest of average citizens.

With respect to civic engagement, scholars have long debated how television can have an impact. In his time displacement hypothesis, Putnam (1995b) contended that the time citizens spend watching television has driven them away from their communities. According to this line of reasoning, the act of television viewing has privatized citizens' leisure time and inhibits participation outside the home; after all, one cannot at the very same moment sit at home watching television and serve as a intramural volleyball coach. Therefore, where citizens once were socializing with one another, working on community projects, and joining bowling leagues, with the penetration of television, they now are engaging in singular activities and “bowling alone” (the title of Putnam's [2000] seminal book). Despite the intuitively appealing nature of this argument, researchers have found no support for the time displacement argument. The time that citizens spent watching television had a direct negative impact on civic engagement; it did not decrease levels of engagement through perceptions of time pressures (Moy et al., 1999). Moreover, despite the prevalence of entertainment fare on television, it is media content not time spent with the medium, that appears to make a difference (Norris, 1996), as illustrated later in this chapter.

Today, as measures of television viewing and political behavior and analytic techniques have become more sophisticated, a nuanced picture of effects has emerged. Television news viewing enhances citizen activity indirectly (McLeod et al., 1999): A television news story generates political discussion, which leads citizens to turn to newspaper coverage of the issue, and reading the news increases political knowledge, which heightens one's belief that the system is responsive. Perceptions of efficacy then make it easier for citizens to take action. When it comes to deliberative conversation, the effects of television news are not as optimistic (Moy & Gastil, 2006). The more citizens watched television news, the more open to political conflict they reported themselves to be. Unfortunately, watching television news was also associated with lower levels of understanding of others' views. Because deliberative conversation is characterized in part by the use of logic, clarity of expression, turn-taking, openness to conflict, and the understanding of differing viewpoints, this finding suggests that television news shows – a genre that now includes much incivility in political discourse – may be moving viewers toward an understanding of political talk that is less than ideal by deliberative standards.

The Internet

The rise of the Internet to political prominence has spawned a debate that has yet to be answered fully. Will new media technologies promote democracy by lowering the cost of communication and participation (Rheingold, 2000) or will they merely be an extension of the existing polity and not lead to significant changes in political behavior (Margolis & Resnick, 2000)? Early empirical research in this area generated inconsistent findings. For example, use of the Internet was shown to be unrelated to voting (Bimber, 2001) and to increase voting (Tolbert & McNeal, 2003); both studies, however, found Internet use to increase the likelihood of engaging in other forms of political participation.

But as scholars' understanding of what it means to “use” the Internet has grown more sophisticated, so has their understanding of the medium's political implications (see Chapter 23). Socially, informationally, or politically motivated uses of the Web increased civic participation behaviors, while using the Internet for household or social recreational use detracted from civic participation (Moy et al., 2005; Pasek, Kenski, Romer, & Jamieson, 2006; Shah, McLeod, & Yoon, 2001). Among the general US population, exposure to online campaign information was associated only with acts of civic participation. And among citizens who expressed greater interest in politics, exposure to online campaign information was associated with higher levels of civic participation, political participation, and political talk (Xenos & Moy, 2007).

Today, the Internet is like television in that it offers citizens a vast menu of content choices. Unlike television, however, the breadth of choices on the Web appears to proliferate with each passing week. As candidates, campaigns, and causes spend increasingly more time shaping their online presence so as to garner support, and as citizens consider reading blogs and joining social networking sites de rigueur, scholars are forced to revisit the effects of the Internet on democracy. The breadth of the Internet allows not only for obtaining information from different websites, but also for engaging in different activities online. As Gil de Zuniga, Veenstra, Vraga, and Shah (2010) noted, the range of political activities available to the public goes beyond the traditional measures of participation that scholars have employed for nearly a half-century. Indeed, as technology has developed, so too has views on what it means to produce and consume messages. Blogging allows citizens to become message producers, to express themselves to a potentially unlimited audience, to inform, and to mobilize. Similarly, political engagement has become increasingly common online via the use of social networking sites, according to a Pew Internet and American Life study (Smith, Schlozman, Verba, & Brady, 2009).

Political Entertainment and the Evolving Media Landscape

The fragmentation of content in today's communication environment is evident in the proliferation of websites and television channels, with many dedicated to a particular issue, obsession, or quirk. Concomitant with this multiplying of sources is how the same content is conveyed across different outlets. For instance, a political advertisement that gets aired once in a small market can receive national coverage by virtue of being included in an adwatch that is covered on network news (in which, for instance, a political analyst comments on the ad), taped and uploaded to YouTube, and referenced in numerous political blogs and “tweeted” through social networks. The clearly delineated media environment of the twentieth century is no longer.

Against this continually shifting media landscape, political communication scholars have turned their attention to examining the political effects of “infotainment,” sometimes referred to as political comedy or political entertainment. The contemporary incarnation of political comedy – as reflected in late night talk shows – has gained political traction as candidates attempt to convey messages about themselves and their policies to audience members who are not typically politically engaged. Moreover, politicians can convey these messages without the filter of a journalist, whereby they risk having carefully crafted messages reduced to a sound bite. Consequently, the viewer who previously could escape the political world by turning to entertainment content has lost the ability to do so.

But political comedy is not a product of contemporary broadcast media. Laughter has long played a role in political discourse. Ancient Greek comedies, as exemplified by the works of Aristophanes, entertained audiences by satirizing political and social life equally (Bates, 1903, Heath, 1987/2007). In L'Homme aux quarante écus, Voltaire employed satire to criticize certain economic and political perspectives. These two exemplars from markedly different time periods illustrate just how political comedy has preceded the accounts that interest political communication scholars today. With their focus on electronic media, political communication scholars begin somewhere in the territory of Richard Nixon's 1968 utterance of “Sock it to me?” on Laugh In, or with references to The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Typically, this quickly gives way to more contemporary pop-political culture reference points such as Bill Clinton's appearances, in 1992, on The Arsenio Hall Show and MTV, Al Gore's and George W. Bush's appearances on late night and daytime talk shows in 2000, and John Edwards' formal announcement of his presidential candidacy on The Daily Show in 2003. Undoubtedly the list soon will include mentions of Tina Fey's unforgettable Saturday Night Live parody of 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric, which seemed to capture the public's attention as much as the original event it was meant to mock.

These iconic events signal how politicians have become increasingly reliant on popular, entertainment-based media outlets as means to reach potential voters. These landmark appearances also draw attention to the explosion of media (television) channels. In 1968, the year in which Nixon appeared on Laugh In to soften his image, television audience members could access half-a-dozen channels (Bogart, 1972). Nearly a quarter-century later, however, when Clinton aimed to reach a younger audience by donning a pair of Ray-Bans and playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, the media landscape had changed drastically. Cable channels had penetrated over half of all television households (Prior, 2007), offering viewers access to CNN, HBO, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Lifetime, and a host of other networks. This proliferation of specialized cable channels in the 1980s and 1990s would continue into the new millennium. What had started as a low-choice, broadcast-dominated communication environment with ample opportunities for incidental learning and widely shared political points of reference (Prior, 2007) had evolved into a balkanized media landscape with highly segmented audiences.

This “stratamentation” (stratification with fragmentation), as Bennett and Iyengar (2008) term it, does not necessarily mean that audiences are shrinking. Politicians' appearances in televised political comedy today, even if viewed by relatively few in its original broadcast, can reach millions via television network websites, blogs linked to the footage, and YouTube. Multiple exposure to the same content consequently has challenged scholars to pinpoint when and under what conditions citizens were exposed to the content in question, and to ascertain the effects of such content.

Regarding the effects of political entertainment on political behavior, research in this area is characterized by mixed findings. On the one hand, Prior's (2007) research suggests that the mere presence of entertainment options in the media landscape may dampen political engagement among significant portions of the public and exacerbate inequalities in participation. Consistent with this line of reasoning, a number of studies have found either null or negative relationships between “non-traditional” news sources and engagement or participation variables. These sources include political comedy shows such as The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (Cao & Brewer, 2008) as well as late night talk shows like The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show (Moy, 2008; Pfau, Cho, & Chong, 2001). Furthermore, entertainment-oriented content that includes sitcoms, dramas, as well as talk shows has a direct negative effect on civic participation (Keum, Devanathan, Deshpande, Nelson, & Shah, 2004).

On the other hand, political entertainment programming has produced democratically desirable behavioral outcomes. These positive effects appear in the form of either direct relationships with traditional political engagement variables, or with variables that are highly associated with participation such as expertise, efficacy, and attentiveness. For example, Cao and Brewer (2008) found positive associations between attention to political comedy shows and certain political activities such as attending campaign events and joining organizations. Additionally, in a comprehensive study of multiple forms of mediated political communication in the 2004 presidential campaigns, Pfau, Houston, and Semmler (2007) concluded that, “the influence of television entertainment talk shows such as Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was associated with greater likelihood of participating in the democratic process” (p. 125).

Given the relative dearth of studies that link political entertainment or non-traditional news sources directly to political behavior, scholars have taken to examining the process by which such a relationship can emerge and identifying other politically relevant factors that might influence behavior. For example, during a campaign season, watching entertainment talk shows can influence viewers' political expertise and attitudes about democratic processes in general (Pfau et al., 2007). In addition, exposure to political comedy can increase viewers' confidence in their own political abilities (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006) and stimulate interest in the world of politics and campaigns (Feldman & Young, 2008). Political attitudes and cognitions, particularly those related to political trust, matter as trust and engagement tend to move lockstep with each other. The evidence is mixed regarding how viewership can affect trust in traditional news media (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006; Moy & Pfau, 2000), but a recent study revealed that exposure to comedy shows is negatively associated with general levels of political trust, while exposure to talk shows is associated with greater trust in political parties (Tsfati, Tukachinsky, & Peri, 2009). These findings have strong implications for how consumption of political entertainment content can influence behaviors, with the process turning on the specific content of interest and the extent to which citizens trust particular institutions and/or officials.

Other patterns in the literature hinge upon individual-level predispositions such as political attentiveness or interest. In positing his gateway hypothesis, Baum (2003) theorized that exposure to content on a given issue in political entertainment programming will enhance interest in and consumption of additional news about this issue in traditional news. Studies undergirded by the gateway hypothesis assume that some viewers may be drawn to this type of content as a result of political interest, while others may select it more for entertainment value, creating an opportunity for incidental effects. Survey data from 2002 and 2004 support this assumption, at least for programs such as The Daily Show: A nontrivial proportion of that program's viewers registered moderate to low levels of interest in politics (Cao, 2010).

The variance in political interest among political entertainment viewers has been leveraged into methodologically diverse research that speaks indirectly to media effects on political behavior. Both surveys and experiments document a process in which viewers with lower levels of attentiveness or political interest can experience unique gains in political attentiveness and learning relative to the already-savvy viewers who share their taste in television. Although the precise mechanisms of these effects remain somewhat unclear, most related research in this area tends to assume that politics wrapped in an amusing package simply makes engagement with political information more appealing and/or less taxing for those without a strong preexisting interest in politics (Cao, 2010; Parkin, 2010; Xenos & Becker, 2010). And if political interest is linked to political activity, then those with initially low levels of interest would become more participatory. Not all studies find differential patterns of association that run in this direction, however. In an early study of exposure to late night comedy and daytime talk show programs during the 2000 presidential race, Moy et al. (2005) found that among viewers who were highly interested in politics, a significantly greater association existed between exposure and political activities such as voting and political discussion. That is, viewing political entertainment enhanced the likelihood of engaging in politics among those already predisposed to do so.

Taken together, this corpus of literature clearly identifies some potential for positive associations between viewing political entertainment content and behaviors that reflect engaged citizenship. But it is also clear that work in this area has found increasingly more contingent effects that require continued theorizing, and that scholars should not treat this particular genre of media content as a unitary phenomenon (Mazzoleni & Sfardini, 2009). Ultimately, with greater and greater blurring of the traditional boundaries between news and entertainment, such research will be increasingly important to address the changing media landscape.

Conclusions

For decades, political communication scholars have sought to better understand the various impacts of mediated communication on political behaviors that constitute the essence of democratic citizenship. Efforts that explore media effects on political and civic behaviors in their numerous manifestations have yielded a substantial set of insights. And, these insights continue to evolve. Research has documented a generally positive relationship between consumption of, or attention to, mass-mediated public affairs content and participatory behaviors. Over time, this work has come to identify the many ways in which these relationships may vary based on audience member characteristics (e.g., their level of political efficacy, their need to survey the political environment, and the extent to which they deeply process the information consumed) and/or the modes and types of communication in question.

The shift toward nuanced and sometimes highly differentiated findings stems from the set of dramatic changes in the mass media environment (and correspondingly, the mass media audience) over the past half-century. Notions of a mass audience began as one served by a relatively simple (broadcast) communications system. However, with the growth of cable television and web-based technologies, this general notion has given way to a complex mosaic of systems infused with a rich digital infrastructure. These technological changes present scholars of media effects and political communication with a target that is not only moving, but also morphing and multiplying.

As Bennett and Iyengar (2008) contended, this stratamentation has serious implications concerning the very core of how scholars think about media effects research. As numerous strands of inquiry have shown, individuals today rarely sit down to see what is on television as so many did in earlier eras. Rather, they are increasingly apt to select a specific news broadcast precisely because they expect it to provide a particular set of ideological frames, or view a comedy program as a direct function of their preference for such content over news (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009). In other words, gone is the assumption that news content, or any other programming, can be treated as relatively independent of an individual's consumption of, or attentiveness to, that content. Stratamentation similarly complicates the intuitive approach of related experimental research in which participants are randomly assigned to view one frame or another, or a comedic versus a serious treatment of a given issue. Though others are not as convinced of the seriousness of these implications (Holbert, Garrett, & Gleason, 2010), it is clear that stratamentation poses serious issues for media effects, in particular, media effects research focused on democratic citizenship.

Theoretical and methodological issues of endogeneity notwithstanding, it is worth identifying a number of substantive issues related to the fragmentation of mass media and the mass audience. As much as social and technological changes bedevil clear thinking about media effects as traditionally understood, they are implicated in a number of other patterns closely related to the collection of outcome variables we have focused on in this chapter. These issues and patterns lead the way toward fruitful areas of new research on the relationships between political communication and democratic citizenship.

The first deals with “infotainment” or political comedy programming, and how its unique properties may create an exception to the patterns typically associated with stratamentation. To explain, at the crux of most discussions of fragmentation is the notion of perfect (or at least increasingly perfect) media filtering. As Prior (2007) argued, an abundance of media choice has created a world in which it is easy for entertainment seekers to consume only frivolity and for political junkies to be exposed only to hard news. In other words, audience members can now efficiently translate their content preferences into personalized consumption. However, as noted by Holbert et al. (2010) and conceded somewhat by Bennett and Iyengar (2010), politically oriented entertainment programming is hybrid in nature, satisfying both news and entertainment preferences. As such, the mix of entertainment and information provided by programs such as The Daily Show or politically themed skits on Saturday Night Live works mischief with the notion of perfect filtering. This is demonstrated by the research on “gateway” effects reviewed earlier, including how entertainment-seekers receive political information and cues as a side effect of watching political comedy. At a minimum, such examples identify a safe harbor in which traditional conceptions of incidental exposure and media effects may continue to make sense. At a more general level, however, they serve to remind us that perfectly homogenized niche audiences may not be the only or inevitable outcome of media fragmentation.

A second issue that will clearly figure prominently in future research is how fragmentation has been occurring not only in terms of media content preferences, but also along ideological or partisan dimensions. The latter both threatens and offers opportunities for central aspects of democratic engagement. On the one hand, ideological and partisan fragmentation poses serious threats to deliberation at the aggregate level. As many citizens occupy smaller and smaller niches, the groups to which they belong and identify may simply talk more and more past each other. Opportunities for true deliberation may be reduced to the enclave level, where the chances of civil encounters with those who hold opposing views are minimal (Sunstein, 2001). More informal interpersonal political discussion may be equally threatened. On the other hand, there is an inherent tension between deliberative engagement and more action-oriented participatory behaviors. The normative assumption behind deliberation, one that is borne out empirically, is that deliberation can enhance levels of political participation (Jacobs, Cook, & Delli Carpini, 2009). Yet as much as “hearing the other side” may delight deliberative theorists, it also is associated with less, rather than more, of other core forms of political activity such as voting (Mutz, 2006). As with any growing body of research, empirical inconsistencies may stem from different theoretical, methodological, and operational perspectives that themselves may be grounded in differing normative assumptions. Although existing efforts have provided key insights into these dynamics, it is clear that additional research into the full implications of ideological and partisan fragmentation for democratic engagement will be necessary for some time into the future.

Last but not least, understanding media effects on democratic citizenship requires a clear delineation of what constitutes meaningful political engagement. Just as recent years have witnessed an exponentiation of media forms, content, and channels, as well as the many communications patterns associated with these changes, there is an expanding menu of ways to participate. Citizens' engagement in both vertical and horizontal interactions can now manifest online and offline. Citizens can now engage in political talk, not only through face-to-face encounters, but also via mobile telephony and a myriad of computer-mediated venues. Moreover, with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, citizens can increasingly provide political information and commentary to other citizens, loosening the monopoly on such communication previously enjoyed by a limited field of “professional communicators” (Page, 1996; Xenos & Kim, 2008). Today, the ease with which citizens can communicate and take action online – from emailing to paying bills to donating to a campaign – suggests that voting may no longer reflect the entry-level stage of involvement that Crotty (1991) believed.

In addition to posing a variety of basic questions about what counts as a useful political engagement variable, broader trends related to these shifting modes of citizen engagement have drawn attention to how conceptions of citizenship may shift over time as well. In particular, contemporary youth are abandoning traditional models of citizen engagement in which a strong sense of duty motivates largely institutionally structured participation and engagement. Instead, they are favoring more individualized politics that involve self-actualization and personal growth (Bennett, 2008). That young adults are also the ones turning to the web and staying connected is not insignificant, particularly as technology has bestowed upon society a 24/7 news cycle and traditional print and broadcast forms of news have melded. Moreover, younger citizens are the ones to turn media consumption into media production. It is clear then that future scholarship will be unable to abandon fundamental normative discussion about what it means to participate and be a good citizen.

In conclusion, while political communications scholars have undoubtedly amassed a significant collection of insights into how media affect democratic citizenship and civic engagement, it is clear that unanswered empirical and normative questions remain. At each end of our most familiar equations, key players and concepts are in flux. Moreover, sociotechnical changes are calling the very form of those equations into question. What remains constant, however, is the importance of understanding the mechanisms and processes by which citizens interact with media and each other in order to learn about political issues, form opinions, and act in ways that communicate their preferences.

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