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The investigation of emphasis framing effects is one of the most often analyzed types of communicative influences on citizens' attitudes within political communication research. A vast amount of empirical studies suggested that simple changes in the emphasis on a specific aspect of an issue or event can produce significantly different issue attitudes, which fostered discussions about citizens' susceptibility to an irrational attitude formation under one-sided framing conditions.
However, the empirical paradigm of researching emphasis framing effects has received important criticism in the last years. Most of this critique argues that the investigated frames have been often confounded with varying thematic information implying that the susceptibility to framing effects is overrated in the literature and could likewise originate from differing issue-specific information and not from the frame emphases themselves. Given that this critique would find empirical support and only varying thematic information would be responsible for framing effects, the found effects in the literature would imply that the attitudinal shifts are not irrational but the result of rationally learning from different thematic information. Moreover, the theoretical contribution of the emphasis framing approach would be seriously questioned and could be nothing more than the longstanding concept of persuasion based on the provision of new thematic information.
In order to test whether emphasis frames exert unique effects on citizens' issue attitudes, this study introduces the concept of salience emphasis frames as a type of framing that is not confounded with the provision of further issue-specific information but uses well-known and cross-thematic patterns of interpretation such as political values to contextualize thematic information. In addition, the study integrates the varying argument strength of thematic information and citizens' political value preferences as two further variables that could condition the frame effect, which enables a test for salience emphasis framing effects in differently challenging situations.

Traditional macroeconomic theories often assume that aggregate economic figures originate in the behaviour of individuals who optimise their utility. In doing so, it is casually taken for granted that all agents act self-centered, profit maximising, and risk neutral. A growing number of studies, mainly from the areas of microeconomics and psychology, contradicts this presupposition. Through data gathered by laboratory experiments it is possible to explore whether humans behave according to theoretical predictions. In order to lay a behavioural foundation to macroeconomic theories, such laboratory experiments can be conducted with a macroeconomic scope. In this dissertation thesis, three different macroeconomic topics are investigated experimentally. One focus is put on the interlinks between economic policy and the labour market. In a laboratory experiment where players in the role of various institutions interact, the policy decisions of governments and central banks, their motivations, and their consequences are analysed with respect to wages and employment. The reactions of the labour market are mainly in line with theory. If the official sector's employment goals are not met, governments tend to increase expenditures, whereas the decisions of central banks seem rather to be motivated by the attainment of price goals. The total of the effects observed deliver a new explanation for the existence of a relationship between employment and the inflation rate. The second emphasis is on the currency trade decisions of firms in the same experiment. The players are guided by interest rate differences rather than by expected exchange rate movements since they are unable to predict exchange rate changes correctly and thus are ambiguity averse. This results in the absence of technical trade, highest profits for interest-conforming traders, and pessimistic expectations concerning the exchange rate. The firms engage in hedging their production-incurred foreign debts against exchange rate risks. A simple decision rule is described on the base of which players would have made profits on average. A transaction tax as proposed by James Tobin is studied in the third part. Experiments have been conducted with an asset market model that includes equally endowed traders. In another variant of the model, a transaction tax is levied on the asset. The trade volume decreases with an increasing tax rate, and so do the fiscal revenues. Price volatility is reduced drastically under a tax regime. Although the market efficiency is higher on taxed markets, there is evidence for lower efficiency with higher tax rates. Concluding it can be said that the Tobin tax has volatility reducing effects on the market, but the tax rate should be low to limit a negative impact on trade volume and market efficiency. The last part derives efficient ways to calculate significance levels of differences in two independent and in two matched samples. This is done with Fisher-Pitman permutation tests, which are frequently used throughout this thesis.

We use a unique, nationally representative, survey of UK social media users ( n = 2,005) to identify the main factors associated with a specific and particularly troubling form of sharing behavior: the amplification of exaggerated and false news. Our conceptual framework and research design advance research in two ways. First, we pinpoint and measure behavior that is intended to spread, rather than correct or merely draw attention to, misleading information. Second, we test this behavior's links to a wider array of explanatory factors than previously considered in research on mis-/disinformation. Our main findings are that a substantial minority—a tenth—of UK social media users regularly engages in the amplification of exaggerated or false news on UK social media. This behavior is associated with four distinctive, individual-level factors: (1) increased use of Instagram, but not other public social media platforms, for political news; (2) what we term identity-performative sharing motivations; (3) negative affective orientation toward social media as a space for political news; and (4) right-wing ideology. We discuss the implications of these findings and the need for further research on how platform affordances and norms, emotions, and ideology matter for the diffusion of dis-/misinformation.

AbstractIn recent years, Europe has been facing the Euro crisis, questioning the whole process of European integration. However, scholars argue that this crisis also presents an opportunity for the Europeanization of national public spheres as public attention regarding Europe has increased. Therefore, this study examines the media discourse on the crisis and the possible convergence of the national public spheres of Germany and Spain. It investigates how the issue is framed and who participates in the discourse during the crisis between 2010 and 2014 in German and Spanish online quality newspapers. Based on a content analysis of 7,256 statements in 961 articles, frames were identified in a data‐driven approach. Results show that German and Spanish media have Europeanized their framing during the crisis and mainly support Europe's policy. This convergence has occurred despite a slight renationalization of discourse participants, indicating that Europeanization has been increasingly sustained by national actors.

Incidental exposure to shared news on Facebook is a vital but understudied aspect of how citizens get involved with politics. This experiment investigates the influence of recommender characteristics (tie strength, political knowledge, political similarity) and different media sources (tabloids, legacy, and digital-born outlets) including multiple mediators (e.g., social pressure, outlet credibility) on incidental exposure to political news on Facebook. A 3 × 3 multi-stimulus, between-subject experiment with two additional quasi-factors and 135 different stimuli was conducted using a representative sample ( N = 507). Results showed that strong ties and recommenders with high knowledge increase news exposure, but the impact of knowledge is limited to recommenders with similar political opinions. Similar effects occur for different media types, which also have an independent impact on news exposure. Structural equation modeling reveals that media source effects are mediated through media perceptions, whereas recommender effects work via the desire for social monitoring and perceived issue importance.

The paper traces the dangers in the closed economy perspective of a monetary policy focused on a domestic inflation goal under a clean float. Field evidence of the damage wrought from this perspective is reinforced by that from a laboratory experiment. The laboratory experiment avoids measurement errors to which econometric estimation is subject concerning omitted or inadequately proxied determinants, non-normally distributed errors, inadequate degrees of freedom, false assumptions of temporal independence and false synchronicity in decision response lags to stimuli. Our laboratory experiment also embeds a new theory of exchange rate determination involving the uncontroversial power of fully cooperating central banks to totally fix the exchange rate. The new model is within a broader theory that includes risk effects normally excluded, SKAT, the Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory. We use SKAT to analyse outliers in our experimental results, and indicate some new directions and foci for econometric work. Our laboratory results point to the superiority of dollarisation, currency unions, a single world money over even dirty floats that include the exchange rate as an objective in its own right.

Government expenditure can be highly variable, if used as a countercyclical instrument, or as a response to economic crises or as a means of rapidly altering other features of the economy. An alternative policy setting is to keep government expenditure changes gradual and modest. It is shown that whether a more discretionary or a more stable usage of government expenditures better attains official sector macroeconomic goals is difficult to determine theoretically, in part because of missed risk effects. But the detecting which policy better meets the official sector macroeconomic goals from analysis of historical data or inter-country comparisons suffers from confounding events and institutions. This study offers a fresh insight from laboratory experiments. Our laboratory results favour gradualism in government expenditures, ie support the advocacy of more stable government expenditures offered in Friedman (1969), in Vernengo and Rochon (2000), and in the 2006 German tax change controversy, by that country?s local government sector.

We explore the implications of online social endorsement for the Covid-19 vaccination programme in the UK. Vaccine hesitancy is a longstanding problem, but it has assumed great urgency due to the pandemic. By early 2021, the UK had the world's highest Covid-19 mortality per million of population. Our survey of a nationally representative sample of UK adults (n=5,114) measured socio-demographics, social and political attitudes, media diet for getting news about Covid-19, and intention to use social media and personal messaging apps to encourage or discourage vaccination against Covid-19. Cluster analysis identified six distinct media diet groups: news avoiders, mainstream/official news samplers, super seekers, omnivores, the social media dependent, and the TV dependent. We assessed whether these media diets, together with key attitudes, including Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy mentality, and the news-finds-me attitude (meaning giving less priority to active monitoring of news, and relying more on one's online networks of friends for information) predict the intention to encourage or discourage vaccination. Overall, super-seeker and omnivorous media diets are more likely than other media diets to be associated with the online encouragement of vaccination. Combinations of a) news avoidance and high levels of the news-finds-me attitude and b) social media dependence and high levels of conspiracy mentality are most likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination. In the direct statistical model, a TV-dependent media diet is more likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination, but the moderation model shows that a TV-dependent diet most strongly attenuates the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and discouraging vaccination. Our findings support public health communication based on four main methods. First, direct contact, through the post, workplace, or community structures, and through phone counselling via local health services, could reach the news avoiders. Second, TV public information advertisements should point to authoritative information sources, such as NHS and other public health websites, which should then feature clear and simple ways for people to share material among their online social networks. Third, informative social media campaigns will provide super seekers with good resources to share, while also encouraging the social media dependent to browse away from social media platforms and visit reliable and authoritative online sources. Fourth, social media companies should expand and intensify their removal of vaccine disinformation and anti-vax accounts, and such efforts should be monitored by well-resourced, independent organizations.

We explore the implications of online social endorsement for the Covid-19 vaccination program in the United Kingdom. Vaccine hesitancy is a long-standing problem, but it has assumed great urgency due to the pandemic. By early 2021, the United Kingdom had the world's highest Covid-19 mortality per million of population. Our survey of a nationally representative sample of UK adults (N = 5,114) measured socio-demographics, social and political attitudes, media diet for getting news about Covid-19, and intention to use social media and personal messaging apps to encourage or discourage vaccination against Covid-19. Cluster analysis identified six distinct media diet groups: news avoiders, mainstream/official news samplers, super seekers, omnivores, the social media dependent, and the TV dependent. We assessed whether these media diets, together with key attitudes, including Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy mentality, and the news-finds-me attitude (meaning giving less priority to active monitoring of news and relying more on one's online networks of friends for information), predict the intention to encourage or discourage vaccination. Overall, super-seeker and omnivorous media diets are more likely than other media diets to be associated with the online encouragement of vaccination. Combinations of (a) news avoidance and high levels of the news-finds-me attitude and (b) social media dependence and high levels of conspiracy mentality are most likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination. In the direct statistical model, a TV-dependent media diet is more likely to be associated with online discouragement of vaccination, but the moderation model shows that a TV-dependent diet most strongly attenuates the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and discouraging vaccination. Our findings support public health communication based on four main methods. First, direct contact, through the post, workplace, or community structures, and through phone counseling via local health services, could reach the news avoiders. Second, TV public information advertisements should point to authoritative information sources, such as National Health Service (NHS) and other public health websites, which should then feature clear and simple ways for people to share material among their online social networks. Third, informative social media campaigns will provide super seekers with good resources to share, while also encouraging the social media dependent to browse away from social media platforms and visit reliable and authoritative online sources. Fourth, social media companies should expand and intensify their removal of vaccine disinformation and anti-vax accounts, and such efforts should be monitored by well-resourced, independent organizations.