Media Context and the 2017 General Election: How traditional and social media shape elections (an extension of ES/M010775/1)

特蕾莎·梅（Theresa May）要求提前举行大选，这为评估和理解媒体在英国政治中的作用提供了一个紧迫的机会。目前，人们认为，一个支离破碎的媒体体系至少要对向选民提供误导性信息负部分责任。我们之前的研究（ES/M010775/1）调查了选举期间和之后的传统（电视、报纸和广播）和社交媒体，其中某种形式的联合政府是预期的结果，被广泛报道的民意调查证实，经济问题使所有其他报道相形见绌。我们的目标是：1)建立一个传统媒体和社交媒体的信息流和媒介间议程设置模型；2)评估国家和地方媒体对特定选区和选民群体的对比影响；3)了解社交媒体在选举过程中的作用；4)检查媒体对学习的影响，竞选期间的偏好变化以及选举后时期对结果合法性的看法。我们研究的一些关键发现为媒体议程设置提供了新的视角，这些议程设置与议题和领导人有关，同时也提供了实验证据，证明选举后对同样“破碎的宣言承诺”的反应高度取决于责任的归因。两年后，选举环境发生了变化，保守党政府占多数，几乎所有主要政党的领导人都不同，英国脱欧既是主要问题，也是举行选举的表面原因，现任政府有可能在一代人中获得最大比例的选票，对民意调查数据和媒体（如“假新闻”和推特机器人）的不信任日益增加。这为我们提供了一个机会，在一场由不同领导人、不同议题、“假新闻”和一场看起来远没有那么激烈的竞选中，重新审视和扩展我们最初的目标。综合起来，这些将使我们能够解决媒体在多大程度上促进选民通过选举过程向政府问责的能力。我们使用我们为大规模媒体数据检索和分析开发的现有基础设施（ES/M010775/1和ES/N012283/1）和一个捕获点击流活动的调查面板来完成它们，这将为我们提供一个独特的机会来检查信息搜索和暴露（例如过滤气泡）。

The snap election called by Theresa May presents an urgent opportunity to assess and understand the role of media in British politics at a time when a fractured media system is being held at least partly responsible for presenting misleading information to voters. Our previous research (ES/M010775/1) examined traditional (television, newspapers and radio) and social media during and after an election in which some form of coalition government was the expected outcome, confirmed by extensive and widely reported polls, and economic issues dwarfed all other coverage. Our aims were to: 1) Develop a model of information flows and intermedia agenda setting from traditional and social media; 2) Assess the contrasting influence of national, and sub-national media on specific constituencies and subsets of the electorate; 3) Understand the role of social media in the electoral process; 4) Examine media effects on learning, preference change during the campaign and perceptions of the legitimacy of the outcome in the post-election period. Some of the key findings of our study have cast new light on intermedia agenda setting with respect to issues and leaders, as well as offering experimental evidence that post-election reactions to the same "broken manifesto promise" are highly contingent on attributions of responsibility. Two years later the electoral context has shifted, with a majority Conservative government, different leaders of almost all the major parties, Brexit is both the main issue and the ostensible reason the election was called, the possibility of the incumbent government gaining the largest proportion of the vote in a generation, and a growing distrust of polling data and the media e.g., 'fake news' and Twitter bots. This provides us with the opportunity to re-examine and extend our original aims in a contest of different leaders and different issues, "fake news" and a seeming far less competitive race. Taken together, these will allow us to address the extent to which media contribute to the ability of voters to hold governments accountable through the electoral process. We accomplish them using a combination of the existing infrastructure that we developed for large scale media data retrieval and analysis (ES/M010775/1 and ES/N012283/1), and a survey panel capturing clickstream activity, which will provide us with a unique opportunity to examine information search and exposure (e.g. filter bubbles).