Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

In recent years, populist parties have been increasingly successful in gaining attention and votes. Several studies suggest that the characteristics of populism – i.e., an anti-elitist viewpoint, a belief in the homogeneity and virtuousness of the people, and demand for popular sovereignty – are not just found in parties’ ideological orientation, but that they also constitute attitudes held by individuals (e.g., Akkerman et al., 2014). In this paper, we analyze how people holding such populist attitudes select and process information that is not in line with their attitudes and which effects such non-consistent information has on their attitude strength. We assess this on the occasion of a televised debate in the run-up to the German national elections in 2017.

Political information usage is influenced by prior political attitudes. The selective exposure paradigm suggests that people seek to avoid dissonant information and hence select content that is in line with their attitudes (Dvir-Gvirsman, 2014; Iyengar & Hahn, 2009). The selective use of information is, among others, intensified by partisanship (Garrett, 2009; Stroud, 2008). In this paper, we analyze the motives as to why citizens expose themselves to information formats clearly dominated by parties that do not represent their political opinions. We assume that gathering arguments against them, rather than being convinced by the opposing viewpoints, are important goals.

Regarding the processing of attitude-inconsistent information, we follow the theory of motivated reasoning which claims that people process information in line with prior arguments to reach a preferred conclusion (Kunda, 1990; Slothuus & De Vreese, 2010): They identify arguments that fit their attitudes as stronger than opposing arguments and actively counter-argue inconsistent information (Bolsen et al., 2014). In the context of the German televised debate, we therefore expect AfD partisans to counter-argue the points made by the representatives of the two mainstream parties and that this disconfirmation bias is stronger the higher the political sophistication and attitude strength. In this sense, we expect motivated reasoning to strengthen pre-existing attitudes (Taber & Lodge, 2006).

We assess these questions based on experimental data collected on the occasion of the 2017 televised debate in Germany. Over 200 respondents were surveyed right before and after they watched the debate, enabling us to identify the direct effects of the debate. Analyses will be based on group differences between partisans of the AfD and other parties as well as populist attitudes before and after the reception of the debate.