"It's All Political": The Role of Political Identity in the Identification and Selection of Politically Relevant Entertainment Media

Abstract

Thanks to technological advances over the past two decades, media consumers now have an unprecedented number of content options. Along with an increase in news options has come an even greater expansion in the number of entertainment options available to media consumers. This is especially true when it comes to fictional entertainment television programming available via cable and services such as Netflix and Hulu. Much attention has been paid to how individuals’ political identities affect their selection of news. Although there is evidence that exposure to entertainment media is fractured along political lines, there remains an assumption that most viewers select entertainment media without any political considerations. The average individual consumes much more entertainment media than they consume news media. What if people’s political identities actually do influence what fictional entertainment media they choose? I contend that 1) individual-level differences such as political identity strength affect whether people evaluate media content as politically relevant, and 2) these evaluations affect whether people selectively expose themselves to fictional entertainment media. Rather than rely on researchers’ designations of media as politically relevant or not, I call for a viewer-centric approach to identifying politically relevant media. Any given media text may be of greater or lesser political relevance to any given media consumer. Unfortunately, asking viewers to identify what television shows are politically relevant isn’t a straightforward process due to the way people often use terms such as “political” and “politics.” To overcome limitations with existing approaches, this dissertation develops a new scale that I use to evaluate individuals’ perceptions of media as politically relevant. I propose a model predicting how the strength of a viewer’s political identities, together with a television show’s content, will affect the viewer’s evaluation of the show as politically relevant. In turn, the evaluation of the show as politically relevant will affect politically motivated selective exposure to that show. In Chapter 2, I develop the Politically Relevant Media (PRM) scale across two studies. In Chapter 3, I examine how attributes of media content and political identities affect evaluations of television programs as politically relevant, as indicated by PRM scale scores. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate the predictive and mediating abilities of the PRM scale. I find that political identity strength has a positive effect on evaluations of television programming as politically relevant, and such evaluations are associated with greater politically motivated selective exposure to fictional entertainment shows. This has implications for the study of politically motivated selective exposure more broadly, but particularly in the context of fictional entertainment media.