Partisan segregation as a result of selective exposure in the modern information society is a doomsday scenario popular among some U.S. scholars (e.g. Bennett and Iyengar 2008). The multiplication of information channels certainly offers an unprecedented opportunity for more selectivity, but this does not necessarily mean that voters actually engage in widespread selective exposure. The paper assesses the phenomenon of de facto selectivity for political information sources in a comparative perspective, comparing the U.S. situation with a wide range of European political and media systems. The analysis draws on very recent data to determine whether partisan segregation at the level of mainstream media sources is a universal phenomenon in advanced Western democracies. This large scale comparison is supplemented by a more detailed analysis of a few selected countries. In the conclusion, the paper addresses the methodological and theoretical implications of the analyses, in particular the usefulness of partisan user ratios to assess partisan selectivity and how the U.S. claims about partisan segregation translate to a European context – whether we deal with a universal phenomenon or rather a case of U.S. exceptionalism.
