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This study examines the role of attack ads in encouraging citizen communication. Using a national survey merged with ad tracking data, this study finds that attack advertising elicited negative emotions about the candidate the voter opposed, which in turn fostered political conversation. However, such indirect effects of campaign advertising were not observed for advocacy advertising. Data also reveal that attack ads outperformed advocacy ads overall when it came to promoting political discussion. Taken together, it is attack advertising, not advocacy advertising, that promotes political discussion, and negative emotions explain, at least in part, how the attack ad effects occur.

This experiment examines whether the presentation mode of televised debates impacts how viewers assess the issues debated. Participants were exposed to a segment of televised debate on either a single- or split-screen. Candidate character and party attachment were more important in how viewers formed opinions of the debated issue with the split-screen than with the single-screen. On the other hand, in the split-screen condition, viewers relied less on pre-existing notions when forming opinions of the debated issue than they did with the single-screen condition. Such modality effects were particularly pronounced for those with low-levels of political attentiveness.

This study explores the role that political advertising plays in the democratic process by examining whether and how political ads encourage citizens to engage in communication activities in the campaign process. To examine this question, political ad tracking data were combined with a national daily survey collected during the 2000 election campaign cycle. The resulting ad volume data and individual communication behavior by geographic location and date allowed examination of how political advertising contexts influenced citizen communication. Results show that, in response to an influx of local political advertising, people sought more political information through television news programs, the Internet, and social networks. Theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.

Scholars of voting behavior have considered party identification, issue positions, and candidate images as key determinants of vote choice. Previous research, however, has not resolved whether the strength of the vote determinants differs across individual voters, depending on patterns of political communication during the course of an election campaign. Research has found both that television news stresses candidates' character rather than policy issues and that political discussion is usually between people who hold similar political beliefs. Based on previous literature, this study hypothesizes that frequent television news viewers are more likely to rely on their perception of candidate image to make an electoral choice, whereas voters who frequently talk to others about politics are more likely to vote on the basis of party identification. National survey data support these hypotheses. Implications for future political communication effects research are discussed.

Abstract
The present study applies the communication mediation model (CMM) to the increasingly prevalent patterns of partisan communication in contemporary polarized politics and fragmented partisan media environments. Specifically, we test the CMM considering (a) two types of news consumption (like-minded and cross-cutting) in the place of overall news use and (b) both affective and cognitive responses. We propose a partisan CMM that consists of a two-step mediation linking partisan news consumption to participation through talk and affective polarization. Results from national survey data covering three U.S. presidential election cycles (the 2012, 2016, and 2020 American National Election Studies) generally supported the model, with like-minded and cross-cutting news use having differential mediation processes on participation.

This study investigates the role of the Internet in protest participation in the Arab world. More specifically, we aim to address three important questions: (1) Does Internet news use increase the chances of protest participation? (2) Does Internet news use amplify or reduce participation gaps that exist among individuals at various socioeconomic strata? (3) How does a country's press freedom act as a contextual factor to shape the role of the Internet in affecting protest participation gaps? The results based on an analysis of the third wave of Arab Democracy Barometer survey suggest that Internet news use for political purposes increases the likelihood of protest participation in the Arab world while it also deepens socioeconomic stratification in participation. Furthermore, national press freedom shapes the intervening role of the Internet. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for political inequality literature and the practical consequences for the Arab world.

The primary goal of this study is to investigate whether and how elite debates stimulate citizens to take part in information seeking and conversation, two common forms of citizen communication that have been theorized as crucial to public deliberation and political engagement. Drawing on national survey data, this study finds that debate viewing was positively related to news consumption and political conversation. The data further suggest that part of these debate effects is mediated by either campaign interest or negative emotions and that the pattern of indirect debate effects is contingent on viewers' partisanship. Negative emotional responses to candidates among partisans play a key role in mediating debate effects on communication behaviors, whereas negative emotions are of little consequence for nonpartisan viewers. For nonpartisan viewers, indirect effects of debate viewing on communication behavior operate only through campaign interest. Implications of these findings for debate research and deliberative democracy are discussed.

While the online sphere is believed to expose individuals to a wider array of viewpoints, a worry about self-reinforcing political echo chambers also persists. We join this scholarly debate by focusing on individual motives for political discussion and dyadic- and structural-level mechanisms that can drive one's message-selection decision in online discussion settings. Using unobtrusively logged behavioral data matched with panel survey responses, our temporal exponential random graph model (TERGM) analysis indicates that message selection in online discussion settings is largely driven by the similarity of one's candidate evaluative criteria and various endogenous structural factors, whereas the impact of overt partisan preference in shaping message selection is much more limited than is often assumed.