Talk by Prof Cornelius Puschmann at the Leibniz Institute on predictors and contingencies of party-political online information searches

As part of the international symposium “Indicators of Social Cohesion in Social Media and Online Media”, organised by the Social Media Observatory (SMO) of the Research Institute for Social Cohesion (RISC) at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research (HBI) from 24 to 26 April, Prof. Cornelius Puschmann from the Lab for Digital Communication and Information Diversity (DCID) (in collaboration with Helena Rauxloh, Lisa Merten, Sebastian Stier) gave a lecture entitled “Watching the Greens? Predictors and Contingencies of Partisan Online Information Seeking”.
Search engines are playing an increasingly important role as an access point for political information, with voters using them to find information about parties, candidates and current news on key topics. Despite extensive research on individual aspects of the search process, studies that integrate multiple steps of this process in an ecological research design and link behaviours to attitudinal factors are lacking. The presentation will present the initial results of a comprehensive longitudinal panel data survey that analyses the search behaviour of around 2,000 German internet users combined with survey data. Factors such as sympathy or antipathy towards political actors, political and news interest as well as socio-demographic characteristics that influence information search are analysed. The results show that strong emotions towards a candidate play an important role in online information searches.