Political Polarization and individualized online Information Environments: A longitudinal Tracking Study (POLTRACK)

• Duration: 2022 – 2025
• Project lead: Prof. Dr. Cornelius Puschmann

Project management: Prof. Dr. Cornelius Puschmann, Dr. Sebastian Stier, Dr. Katrin Weller

Project collaboration: Helena Rauxloh

Funding: Leibniz Association

The online information environment offers citizens a wealth of news and other content that is relevant to political opinion formation and varies considerably in terms of journalistic quality and political extremity. Politicians, journalists and academics have speculated that this diversity of information contributes to audience fragmentation and political polarization by fostering highly individualized opinion-forming processes. However, research on the interplay between media exposure and dynamic polarization processes is sparse and sometimes contradictory. One of the reasons for this is that methods traditionally used by social scientists to measure media exposure, such as survey-based self-report measures, do not adequately capture online behavior.

Our project combines methods from computational social science with theories from communication and political science. The centerpiece is a one-year web tracking of a sample of around 1500 German citizens from an online access panel. The participants are asked about their demographics, political opinions and media use and consent to their visited websites being recorded. Through web crawling and automated text analysis of the website content visited, we are able to measure the diversity of sources, topics and actors of the information and relate this to the development of the political opinions of the study participants over time. With this longitudinal data, we can systematically and statistically break down the interplay between online information use and political opinions. The results have implications for scientific and political debates about echo chambers, social cohesion and the regulation of online environments.