Selective Negative Exposure? How Negative Partisanship Shapes Information-Seeking Behaviour

A vast literature on the concept of selective exposure suggests that individuals tend to consume information that is congruent with their pre-existing dispositions, such as their preferred party. However, we still know little about the effects of negative partisanship, individuals' rejection of a particular party, on media consumption habits. Do negative partisans seek or avoid news about their disliked party, and to what extent may this reinforce or reduce out-party dislike? I attempt to answer these questions through the combination of a three-wave panel survey and web-tracking data collected before and after the 2021 German federal election. I combine insights from political psychology and media studies to link negative partisanship to information-seeking behaviour through the notion of "selective negative exposure". I hypothesise that, in order to validate and reaffirm their negative party identification, negative partisans disproportionately seek news content about their out-party, especially if such content portrays the party in an unfavourable light. Empirically, I pursue this claim in four steps, leveraging a detailed record of survey respondents’ phone and browser activity during the election period. Firstly, I analyse whether negative partisans are more likely to access webpages (i.e. URLs) from mainstream news websites that mention their disliked party. Secondly, I zoom in on the claim that unfavourable news content should be particularly appealing to negative partisans by classifying a subset of these party-related URLs (i.e., those that could be fully scraped) as being favourable or unfavourable towards the party. As a further test of the proposed mechanism, I identify key events in the election period that have may cast the party in a negative light (e.g. faux-pas by key party elites) and analyse whether news articles related to these events attracted negative partisans. Lastly, I explore whether this "negative" pattern of consumption influences attitudes towards the out-party in the short-run. Preliminary results indicate that negative partisanship has a similar effect on news consumption as positive partisanship, with negative partisans disproportionately consuming news content about their disliked party. This finding may carry worrying implications for mechanisms that aim at reducing polarisation through exposure: though negative partisans may not avoid "the other side", this exposure is likely to be negatively biased and primarily serve the purpose of validating pre-existing animosity.