THREATPIE: The Threats and Potentials of a Changing Political Information Environment

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This project examines how the current changes in the political information environments inEuropean democracies affect the conditions for a healthy democracy. As a theoreticalbackground we employ the concept of ‘political information environment’ (PIE) that includes boththe supply and demand of political news and information. Supply refers to the quantity andquality of news and public affairs content provided through traditional and new media sources,demand captures the amount and type of news and information the public wants or consumes.Recent changes in the political information environment may lead to a growing number ofuniformed, misinformed and selectively informed citizens, potentially endangering thefunctioning of democracy. To examine these concerns, the study aims at investigating thefollowing: (1) how do citizens today gain political information and how does this relate to theirpolitical attitudes and behaviour; (2) what is the content and quality of the information citizensare exposed to; (3) where do divides between being informed and not being informed exist,across and within European societies, and (4) how can citizens be empowered to navigate andfind valuable information. We will do this through a series of comparative, innovatively designedstudies, including web tracking, comparative surveys, focus groups and survey-embeddedexperiments in 14 European countries and the US. These countries vary on a number of keycontextual factors relevant for the study, covering both “young” and established democracieswith different democratic traditions, media systems, and news consumption habits.