Work in political communication has discussed the ongoing predominance of negative news, but has offered few convincing accounts for this focus. A growing body of literature shows that humans regularly pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, however. This paper...

This paper demonstrates that citizens in seven advanced industrialized democracies generally oppose more open immigration policies, but stand ready to admit individual immigrants. Using an experimental design, we demonstrate the applicability of the “person-positivity bias” to immigration...

This paper reports results from an application of Thomas Schelling’s (1960) concept of a focal point to the measure of social agreement on the received tone of media content. In our experiments, subjects rate the tone, positive, negative, or neutral, of newspaper articles and news broadcasts,...

This paper presents results from a content analytic study of evening news programs on energy and environmental news topics - 1,532 on NBC and 1,819 on CTV - from 1999 to 2009. The analysis reveals a focus on severe weather news in both countries, albeit with a somewhat greater focus on that...

Drawing on a unique experimental design, this paper examines the ways in which racialized images influence attitudes toward redistributive policy. While work in the US points to a strong racialization of welfare attitudes, little research explores the ways in which race may structure attitudes...

Public responsiveness to government policy is a crucial component of representative democracy, but may be far weaker in federal regimes. This article explores the consequences of federalism for public responsiveness in one highly federalized policy domain: welfare spending in Canada. Results...