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How Media Content Shapes Affect towards Political Institutions via Populistic Attitudes ‐ A Daily Diary Study among Adolescents

Anna-Maria Mayer, University of Duisburg-Essen; Philipp Jugert, University of Duisburg-Essen

Media plays a more and more relevant role, when it comes to adolescent's exposition to political content. This content together with its valence can have an influence on the affect towards political institutions, as communication mechanisms employed by media may amplify, though unintentionally, populistic attitudes (Ejaz, 2019; Podschwadek, 2019). These in turn may lead to more negative affect towards political institutions, especially when possibilities to interact with an institution are rare (e.g. EU institutions). However, previous research has mostly relied on cross-sectional studies, that do not allow to (a) capture experiences closer to when they happen; (b) track changes in fluctuating states; and (c) strengthen causal inference by establishing temporal order (Ong & Burrow, 2017). Thus, by implementing an intensive longitudinal design (online daily diaries), we studied daily and lagged associations of media valence on emotions towards the EU mediated by populistic attitudes. Data was collected from 371 adolescents with ten measurement points. We will run multilevel models with and without lagged effects for all days on which participants indicated being exposed to political content to test the expected associations. We expect that negative perceived political content will be positively related to populistic attitudes on the same and next day and indirectly negatively related to positive emotions towards the EU on the same and next day. Opposite associations are expected for positive perceived political content. We further expect that base levels of trust in EU institutions will moderate these associations. Participants with high trust in EU institutions will show more stable positive emotions towards the EU, even when exposed to negative media content, while participants with low trust in EU institutions will show more stable negative emotions towards the EU.

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