Thesis
Political consequences of news styles and social norms in China
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
2019
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/101626
Abstract
News media has been found as a contextual factor impacting the formation of political attitudes in democracies. However, few studies have examined how news media affects opinion formation in authoritarian regimes, since it is often assumed that mass media only provides the consensus among elites. Given the less constrained information environment, it is important to revisit media effects in authoritarian contexts. Two variations in news content are considered as crucial to political attitudes in the Chinese context. They are news styles (i.e. hard news versus soft news) as well as social norms (i.e. collectivism and individualism). The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of news styles and social norms in news content on support for different norms of democracy. To test the hypotheses, a 2 (News Styles: Hard News/Soft news) X 2 (Social Norms: Collectivism/Individualism) experiment with a control condition was designed to demonstrate the effect of each treatment. Different news articles about the birth control policy were created for treatment conditions. An online survey experiment was conducted on a popular cross-sourcing website in China named zbj. A total of 194 respondents were used for analyses after filtering inattentive respondents and those failing to complete the survey within 35 minutes. Results indicated that manipulating news styles and social norms in news articles about the birth control issue failed to change people's support for liberal democratic and paternalistic guardianship norms. Though the whole models failed to predict support for liberal democratic and guardianship norms, there was some evidence showing an interaction effect of news styles and social norms. Supplementary analyses on regime evaluation and policy support found some evidence in the main effect of news styles on policy support, as well as the interaction effect on both outcomes. This thesis concludes with an interpretation of results, a discussion of the implications, limitations, as well as directions for future research.
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Details
- Title
- Political consequences of news styles and social norms in China
- Creators
- Qin Li
- Contributors
- Jay D. Hmielowski (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Edward R. Murrow College of Communication
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; [Pullman, Washington] :
- Identifiers
- 99900525005201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis