UC Davis

The role of diversity in shaping political communication was examined in the context of partisan media and audiences in the United States. In the first study, partisan diversity was conceptualized as a geographical context in terms of party preferences. Using a set of nationwide representative panel survey data (2012, 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies: N = 10343) with multilevel modeling techniques, its effects on homogeneous political discussion, knowledge, and affective polarization were tested. The results revealed that county-level partisan diversity was negatively related to the average levels of like-minded political talk and affective polarization. The results also revealed that county-level partisan diversity attenuated the positive relationship between like-minded news use and homogeneous political discussion. Furthermore, its indirect moderating effects were found on political knowledge and affective polarization. In the second study, partisan diversity was defined as a communication context by which political information was surrounded. The online experiment (N = 574) was run by manipulating comments and emojis on social media posts that talked about abortion (pro-choice versus pro-life Facebook posts). Specifically, the number of like-minded/dissimilar comments and favorable/hostile emojis was manipulated to create three different contexts (homogeneous, balanced, and heterogeneous). The results revealed that the gaps of perceived bias between pro-attitudinal and counter-attitudinal posts were reduced when it came to a heterogeneous context. Furthermore, a heterogeneous context was found to indirectly mitigate discomfort toward out-party supporters and political participation intention through reducing the hostile media perception. Taken together, it was found that partisan diversity could alleviate democratically undesirable consequences of partisan media use and communication.