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orcid.org/0000-0001-6724-7559
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Publications
Journal Articles
(4) Merkley,E. and Stecula, D.A. (2018). "Party Elites or Manufactured Doubt? The Informational Context of Climate Change Polarization," Science Communication 40(2), 258-274.
(3) Wlezien, C., Soroka, S.N. and Stecula, D.A. (2017). "A Cross-National Analysis of the Causes and Consequences of Economic News," Social Science Quarterly 98(3), 1010-1025.
(2) Soroka, S.N., Stecula, D.A. and Wlezien, C. (2015). "It's (Change in) the (Future) Economy, Stupid: Economic Indicators, the Media, and Public Opinion," American Journal of Political Science 59(2), 457-474.
(1) Thrall, A.T., Stecula, D.A. and Sweet, D. (2014). "May We Have Your Attention Please? Human Rights NGOs and the Problem of Global Communication," The International Journal of Press/Politics 19(2), 135-159.
- Journal version
- Commentary based on the article in Washington Post (Monkey Cage)
- Article in Slate
- Article on Harvard's Journalist's Resource
Book Chapters
(2) Thrall, A.T. and Stecula, D.A. (2017) "All the World’s a Stage: The Rise of Transnational Celebrity Advocacy for Human Rights" in Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights, Oxford: Routledge.
(1) Thrall, A.T., Stecula, D.A., and Moyer, R. (2014). Building a Better Boomerang? Human Rights, NGOs and the New Media ; Forthcoming in Franziska Oehmer (Ed.), Politische Interessenvermittlung und Medien. Funktionen, Formen und Folgen medialer Kommunikation von Parteien, Verbänden und sozialen Bewegungen (eng. Political Interest Representation and the Media. Functions, Forms and Follow-up of online and mass communication of Parties, Interest Groups and Social Movements), Nomos Publisher.
Current Research Projects
The projects that I currently am working on span several subfields, primarily political communication, political behavior, and science communication. As part of my postdoc at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, I am working on understanding vaccine hesitancy among Americans under the direction of Kathleen Hall Jamieson. I am also involved in in research aimed at understanding science curiosity with Dan Kahan at the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. As part of my postdoc position at Simon Fraser University, I am studying source credibility in the age of misinformation with Mark Pickup. I'm also continuing to collaborate with Eric Merkley on understanding the nature of coverage and its effects on public opinion of scientific topics, like climate change, childhood vaccinations and genetically engineered organisms. I am also currently conducting studies on source credibility in the new media landscape and the role graphs play in understanding information. Some more details on selected projects are below.
The Dynamics of Polarization: How the Media and Party Elites Facilitated the Growth of Climate Skepticism with Eric Merkley
Abstract:
Commentators are often perplexed about American polarization on issues where there is scientific consensus. One such issue is climate change. This article explores how the dynamics of climate change news media coverage contributed to polarizing the American public. We show that climate skepticism has been on the rise in America by constructing a “mood” measure going back to 1992 using the Roper Centre polling archive. We use automated and human content analysis of nearly 12,000 news articles published by the New York Times, Washington Post and the USA Today over a 34 year period (1980-2014) to show that journalistic “balance” in climate coverage has declined overtime, while politicization has steadily increased. We provide evidence using simple time series models that rising skepticism is primarily a result of party elite-driven persuasion facilitated by a proliferation of party cues in media coverage. Democratic cues, higher in volume and more consistent in direction, appear to drive public skepticism rather than being primarily influenced by Republican elites. The results conform to Berinsky’s elite cue theory and suggest we should see climate change polarization as a more typical case of public opinion formation.
The projects that I currently am working on span several subfields, primarily political communication, political behavior, and science communication. As part of my postdoc at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, I am working on understanding vaccine hesitancy among Americans under the direction of Kathleen Hall Jamieson. I am also involved in in research aimed at understanding science curiosity with Dan Kahan at the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. As part of my postdoc position at Simon Fraser University, I am studying source credibility in the age of misinformation with Mark Pickup. I'm also continuing to collaborate with Eric Merkley on understanding the nature of coverage and its effects on public opinion of scientific topics, like climate change, childhood vaccinations and genetically engineered organisms. I am also currently conducting studies on source credibility in the new media landscape and the role graphs play in understanding information. Some more details on selected projects are below.
The Dynamics of Polarization: How the Media and Party Elites Facilitated the Growth of Climate Skepticism with Eric Merkley
Abstract:
Commentators are often perplexed about American polarization on issues where there is scientific consensus. One such issue is climate change. This article explores how the dynamics of climate change news media coverage contributed to polarizing the American public. We show that climate skepticism has been on the rise in America by constructing a “mood” measure going back to 1992 using the Roper Centre polling archive. We use automated and human content analysis of nearly 12,000 news articles published by the New York Times, Washington Post and the USA Today over a 34 year period (1980-2014) to show that journalistic “balance” in climate coverage has declined overtime, while politicization has steadily increased. We provide evidence using simple time series models that rising skepticism is primarily a result of party elite-driven persuasion facilitated by a proliferation of party cues in media coverage. Democratic cues, higher in volume and more consistent in direction, appear to drive public skepticism rather than being primarily influenced by Republican elites. The results conform to Berinsky’s elite cue theory and suggest we should see climate change polarization as a more typical case of public opinion formation.
