Cognitive Style, Selectivity, and Reinforcement: Toward

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Rinke, Eike Mark, and Julia Lück. 2010. “Cognitive Style, Selectivity, and Reinforcement: Toward Clarifying the Role of Political Ideology in the Reception of Political Communication.” In Politische Kommunikation Heute: Beiträge des 5. Düsseldorfer Forums Politische Kommunikation, edited by Kathrin Mok and Michael Stahl, 219–34. Berlin, Germany: Frank & Timme.

Published version available in public domain courtesy of Frank & Timme publishers. EIKE MARK RINKE & JULIA LÜCK

Cognitive Style, Selectivity, and Reinforcement: Toward Clarifying the Role of Political Ideology in the Reception of Political Communication

If political communication does not entail uniform effects, what is it really that conditions the consequences of political messages for their recipients? Com- munication researchers have asked this question for a long time and »political predispositions« has been a popular answer for nearly as long. It dates back at least to Lazarsfeld et al.’s familiar »People’s Choice« study (1944) and Hyman and Sheatsley’s (1947) statements that »people seek informationMaterial congenial to their attitudes« (p. 417) and »people will interpret … information in different ways, according to their prior attitudes« (p. 418). These phenomena have later been referred to as selective exposure and selective perception (Klapper, 1960). For various reasons, there has been a resurging interest in scholarship on partisan selectivity in political communication of late. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this line of researchgeschütztes by envisaging an integration of concepts, theories and methodological instruments from the »motivated social cognition approach« (Jost et al., 2003) in political psychology. We take the first steps of this integrative enterprise: First, we outline the relevance of motivated selectivity research in the context of ongoing minimal effects debates. After that, we present readers with the current scope of research in the field of selective exposure and perception. Finally, we sketch a novel approach to research on political partisan selectivities in political communication, one that should paveurheberrechtlich the way for a better understanding of the nature of such selectivities and, by extension, of the different patterns of media effects as they occur along lines of ideological difference.

1 »Minimal Effects«: The Resurgence of a Familiar Paradigm

In a recent article, Bennett and Iyengar (2008) suggest that today we are facing »a new era of minimal effects« referring back to a notion developed in 1940s

© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 219 and early 1950s media effects research. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1944) proposed a substitution of the commonsensical paradigm of strong media effects with a model of »limited effects« and Klapper (1960) maintained that if there are any media effects at all they would be highly conditional and depend- ing on predispositions of the audience – thus, what media can do is reinforce existing attitudes and opinions rather than change them. According to Bennett and Iyengar (2008) as well as Stroud (2008), the major difference between the historical situations in the 1940s and the beginning twentieth century is that in the mid-twentieth century social networks (e.g., churches and parties) exerted a stronger influence on the individual predispositions of citizens compared to today’s situation in which ties to such networks have become looser, more flexible, and more temporary. At the same time, opportunities to primarily attend to information that fits existing beliefs have grown due to greater choice of media options. These complementary developments have led to a resurgent interest of scholars in the minimal effects paradigm. In Materiallight of these developments Bennett and Iyengar (2008: 724) conclude: »As media audiences devolve into smaller, like-minded subsets of electorates, it becomes less likely that media messages will do any other than reinforce prior predispositions« This view suggests that sweeping effects of political communication are highly unlikely. But, as Iyengar and Simon (2000) suggest, this does in no way entail that »effects« should be discarded completely.geschütztes Rather, what we are confronted with is an increasing need to properly conceptualize media effects in order to better understand them. They propose what they call a »resonance model« of political communication effects. Such a model is meant to account for interactions between features of content or sources of political communication and audience characteristics in the emergence of political communication effects. Underlying this model is the recognition that even if voters might not be persuaded by any particular political message this does not mean that it has no effect at all.urheberrechtlich As has been shown by Holbert (2005), for example, viewing debates between US presidential candidates tends to reinforce voting decisions of Democrats and Republicans rather than to reverse them. However, the reinforcement hypothesis has not gone uncriticized. An illustrative case in point is a study conducted by Chaffee and Miyo (1983), who tested the hypothesis in a panel study of adolescents and their parents concluding that reinforcement based on political partisanship only occurs under specific circumstances (e.g., among people with less political experience) – which led them to reject a straightforward generalization of the hypothesis. However,

220 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur enormous social and technological change has occurred since the 1980s which seems to warrant a reconsideration of the claims associated with the minimal effects paradigm. A common denominator of early minimal effect theories and their today equivalents is the assumption that people choose and perceive media information according to their existing predispositions. As was noted above, the two most prominent mechanisms which work to produce minimal effects under- stood as »reinforcement effects« have been those of selective exposure to and selective perception of messages received through mediated communication. Understanding the nature of minimal effects assumptions thus necessitates an understanding of selectivity in media exposure and perception. We will pro- vide a brief review of important milestones in selective exposure and perception research in the following section1, before we propose to draw on the »motivated social cognition« model of ideology from political psychology as a new direction in research on reinforcement effects in politicalMaterial communication.

2 Selective Exposure and Perception: Mechanisms of Partisan Reinforcement

Selective exposure research has tried togeschütztes clarify whether, why, how and under which conditions media users tend to selectively expose themselves to media information. Despite the age of the concept, the very concept of selective exposure is still disputed in academic debate (Stroud, 2008; Smith, Fabrigar, & Norris, 2008). The task before us here is to present the evidence for an assumption of widespread contemporary selective exposure and contrast it with evidence for the alternative rival hypothesis that giving people access to more and more information leads to them being confronted with diverse opinions and worldviewsurheberrechtlich as well as being more informed and open-minded. To this end, our first step will be to explain the concept of selective exposure before giving a brief review of traditional as well as more recent research in this field. One of the first theories where selective exposure was a central approach to explain how people choose information was Festinger’s »Theory of Cognitive Dissonance« (1957). This work has been a frequent subject of academic disputes, with some arguing for its validity (e.g., D’Alessio & Allen, 2002) and

...... 1 For a more extended recent review of selective exposure research, see Smith, Fabrigar, & Norris (2008).

© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 221 others arguing against its empirical evidence (e.g., Donsbach, 1991). Notwith- standing these disputes, its heavy influence on selective exposure research is beyond question. Festinger argued that an urge to avoid cognitive dissonance is a universal human trait and that there is a universal need for cognitive closure in humans. This means that people avoid information that is inconsistent to the existing opinions and more or less ignore information that does not fit into their own worldview. Consequently, in his view, selective exposure is a key strategic action to reduce intraindividual dissonance. A decade later, Sears and Freedman (1967) published a widely regarded overview of then-available selective exposure research, in an attempt to rectify conceptual inconsistencies and clarify the empirical evidence available at the time. One of their major conclusions was that rather than looking for selectivity in exposure to attitude-inconsistent information it might be more useful to investigate partisan selectivity in the perception (in their words: evaluation) of such information. In the conceptual part of their exposition,Material they distinguish three different definitions of selective exposure. These distinctions are still important to bear in mind when dealing with this concept. The first notion of selective exposure they identified was as »[a]ny systematic bias in audience composition« (Sears & Freedman, 1967: 195). Here, selective exposure is said to occur whenever the audience of a program includes a particular group of people more often than expected bygeschütztes chance. The second understanding of selective exposure refers to it as »unusual agreement about a matter of opinion« (ibid.: 196). This second understanding actually represents an extension of the first in that it also refers to a merely descriptive account of an imbalance in an audience to communication content, only with an explicit focus on imbalances with regard to audience attitudes towards the objects of the messages received. Both approaches to selective exposure are not offering an explanatory account of selectivity in exposure to information and are therefore referred tourheberrechtlich as »de facto selective exposure«. The authors present a third understanding which comes closer to explaining why selective exposure occurs: This third view holds that people have a preference for supportive, rather than nonsupportive, information (Sears & Freedman, 1967: 196). To serve this preference, people actively seek out those kinds of information which do not challenge their existing worldviews. Seeking out actively does not mean that people need to be conscious of this process. On the contrary, unconscious behavior plays an important role; this is why, later in this article, we are going to explore how basic psychological conditions which mostly remain uncon-

222 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur scious might exert an influence on the selectivity of people in the reception of political communication. But first we will have a look at the selectivity research that was published after the publication of Sears’ and Freedman’s influential article. Did it corroborate their skeptical view with regard to the usefulness of selective exposure as a relevant mechanism in information processing? As was the case in the 1960s, further selective exposure research yielded findings that, at first glance, appear inconsistent or even contradictory: some studies supported the selective exposure hypothesis, whereas others did not yield support or provided evidence of selective exposure to attitude-consistent information under special conditions. Hence, the selective exposure debate is far from finished and, as Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng (2009) note, the question of whether and how selective exposure works in general as well as in specific contexts is still unsettled. This is true mostly because of concerns about the consequences of one of the most striking characteristics of the newly emerging media environment: the rapid and drastic increaseMaterial of choice for media users between sources of mediated information brought about espe- cially by the rise of the Internet as a means of communication and the multi- plication of radio and television frequencies as a consequence of the widespread switch to digital media technologies (see, e.g., Prior, 2007). Since this situation seems to make the exercise of partisan selectivity in audiences (a) more likely and (b) more consequentialgeschütztes for the political communication system and the democratic system as a whole, exploring processes of selective exposure and selective perception seems more important than ever. For example, some recent scholarship argues that if new media technologies lead people to only choose information that fits into their existing worldviews this can lead to a more fragmented and polarized citizenry for which it is increasing difficult to find the kind of common ground needed in pluralist democra- cies (e.g., Kobayashi & Ikeda, 2009; Sunstein, 2007). Concerns about the rise of cyber-balkanizationurheberrechtlich and enclave partisan deliberation (see, e.g., Sunstein, 2007) entail a new demand for research on selectivity processes in political communication. This demand has been met by a number of recent studies on the topic. In what follows, we are going to review some of this research, con- centrating on selective exposure and perception that is linked to political ideology and partisanship in media users. The roles of political ideology and partisanship for perception and inter- pretations of world events have long been studied – not only in the field of selective exposure research, although we focus on this field here. The American

© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 223 Voter by Campbell et al. (1960) has become one of the classic studies with a major conclusion being that political partisanship forms political opinions, attitudes and perceptions. Ever since the publication of this book the question of the relationship between political attitudes and perceptions has played an important role in political communication research. In a recent survey study, Stroud (2008) maintained that some topics (e.g., politics) are more likely to encourage selective exposure than others. As a response to critics of previous selective research, she suggests investigating people’s habitual exposure patterns rather than single exposure decisions – a research strategy proposed by Sears and Freedman (1967: 213) as well. She is also interested in the distinct features of relationships between selective exposure and different media types: Do some media encourage selective exposure more than others? In order to examine the use of newspaper, political talk radio, cable news and political websites she used data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey and found that selective exposureMaterial regularly occurs across all of these media types. Recent studies have further investigated the relationship between selective exposure and political ideology. Iyengar and Hahn (2009), for example, pro- vide evidence for media selectivity of users along lines of political party preferences. In an experimental design they investigated whether Republicans and Democrats tend to prefer news sourcesgeschütztes that report in a manner consistent with their beliefs and compared the outcome with the political preferences of participants. They found that people prefer to encounter information they judge to be supportive of their existing beliefs. Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng (2009) report a similar study. They set up an experiment with computer-based sessions during which participants were asked to choose online news while the computer coded whether articles chosen were attitude-consistent or counter-attitudinal based on opinions of the participantsurheberrechtlich that were tapped in advance of the sessions. Their results showed that selective exposure prevailed regardless of issue types and was more pro- nounced for participants with high levels of habitual news consumption. In another study, Graf and Aday (2008) investigated whether people choose online political information that is consistent with or counters their previous beliefs. They set up quasi-experiments and found that their participants indeed spent more time reading online articles which were consistent with their prior opinions.

224 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur In two related recent selective exposure studies, Garrett analyzed survey data (2009b) and data from a web-administered behavior-tracking study (2009a). In both instances, he as well found that people tend to seek out information consistent with their political viewpoints and have a higher likelihood of attending to supportive than to opinion challenging information. However, he qualifies older findings by showing that people do not actively try to avoid challenging information but rather tend to seek out attitude-consistent messages. Similar results were presented by Kobayashi and Ikeda (2009) whose analysis of US and Japanese survey data yielded evidence of selective exposure to, but not selective avoidance of, information on the Internet. A summary of these recent studies suggests a refinement of selective exposure hypotheses: While reduction of cognitive dissonance as a generalized explanation for selective exposure seems more and more implausible, the evidence for similarity effects in political information selection processes is growing.2 In addition, there is another common featureMaterial of the cited recent selective exposure studies that is of particular importance for us here: They typically make an implicit assumption of equivalence of ideological predispositions. In this view, conservatism and liberalism/left-leaning political orientations are two sides of the same coin. Political partisans of both sides are as- sumed to act similarly while shaping their political information environment: they try to bolster their own views withgeschütztes supportive information and (to a lesser degree) avoid challenging messages. The point we are making in this paper is that this view neglects important differences between political partisans and, consequently, their information exposure patterns. A second important concept in research on selectivity in political communication is that of selective perception which was part of the minimal effects paradigm formulated by Klapper and has been subjected to scrutiny by different lines of research since then.3 Bartels (2002), for example, made an effort to clarify the relationshipurheberrechtlich between political attitudes and perceptions via analysis of panel data showing that political orientation significantly shapes people’s perception of political events. These perceptual biases were also shown to

...... 2 Similarity effects in political communication, not only with regard to selective exposure but also with regard to selective perception and evaluation, are one of the most promising research domains in political communication research. Of late, there have been several contributions to this line of research (e.g., Bailenson et al., 2006; 2008), which draw on insights on similarity biases in personal judgment from a long-standing tradition of similarity research in social psychology (e.g., Brock, 1965; Burger et al., 2004; Byrne, 1961). 3 For a brief, general overview of selective perception research, see Shrum (2008). For a broader overview of perception and media effects in general, see Shrum (2006).

© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 225 reinforce differences between the opinions of Democrats and Republicans in his study. Lodge and Taber (2005) took a similar but slightly different approach by examining the so-called hot cognition hypothesis which states that affective ratings of former political situations are saved in memory and automatically (and mostly unknowingly) become influential in new situations that involve a similar stimulus which leads to a partisan perceptual bias in like situations. In a 2006 article, Taber and Lodge further examined the phenomenon of »motivated skepticism« with which they sought to develop a psychological explanation for such biases. Using an experimental research design, they elicited a strong prior attitude effect that consisted of two main biases: First, they detail a »disconfirmation bias« (Lodge & Taber, 2005: 476) which means that people tend to be critical of arguments that contradict their own standpoints while they are less critical of arguments that underpin their own stances. Second, Taber and Lodge establish a »confirmation bias« (LodgeMaterial & Taber, 2005: 476): In their experiments, when given free choice, participants predominantly chose sources of such information that confirmed their prior opinions. While confirmation bias is akin to notions of selective exposure, disconfirmation bias is closely related to selective perception meaning that people do not only choose those media types and contents from which they presume to get information that fits their existing opingeschütztesions but also interpret information in such a way as to maximize consistency with prior belief structures. Recently, however, Prior (2009) provided experimental evidence suggesting that partisan perception biases might in part be an artifact due to a consistency-maintenance bias of participants in survey interviews (i.e., perceptions reported are made to be consistent with reported political partisanship). His study further differentiates knowledge on partisan perceptual bias in that he finds that the degree to which partisanship leads to biased perceptions of objective conditionsurheberrechtlich is lower for questions with less partisan relevance and no express connection to political partisanship. Given these findings on selective exposure and perception, an obvious question is whether the occurrence of these processes in the reception of political communication is systematically related to characteristics of different available sources of political information. As was mentioned above, Stroud (2008) found that selective exposure to political information occurs across all media types. In her study, she examined the use of newspaper, political talk radio, cable news and political websites with data from the 2004 National

226 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur Annenberg Election Survey. However, as such, this finding does not invalidate the assumption that the form of the medium is influential for selectivity to the extent that it impacts the degree of user activity during reception. For example, it is much easier to seek out (i.e., selectively expose oneself to and selective perceive) information that is consistent with one’s existing predispositions from a newspaper and on the Internet (so-called »pull media«) than on television (a so-called »push medium«). This is in line with the reasoning of Gold- man and Mutz (2009). In a multi-nation survey study, they show that newspaper readers are more likely to exercise partisan selective exposure compared to television viewers, presumably due to greater ease of identifying the political slant of a newspaper and matching it with one’s own political views. In this context, questions concerning the democratic role of the Internet as a new medium are of special interest. By and large, speculations about the role of the Internet are two-sided (see Valentino et al., 2009): One side argues that in- creased access to information and opportunities for politicalMaterial expression and debates on the Internet will have positive net effects for democracy. On the other side there are those who emphasize dangers of social fragmentation and ideological polarization due to selective exposure to information which is facilitated by the high degree of user-sovereignty and -activity in the process of information selection. These issues indicate both, the timeliness and relevance of addressing questions concerning selectivegeschütztes exposure. There is only a realistic chance for them to be answered, if future research succeeds in pinpointing the ancillary conditions for the occurrence of selective exposure and perception. This article is meant to propose a new direction in the study of political ideology of media users as such an ancillary condition in this specific context. After this short review of recent work in the field of selective exposure and selective perception research, we sum up by noting two points: First, taken together, the presented studies show that, by and large, people tend to attend to informationurheberrechtlich from media sources with which they expect to agree and to perceive in ways that are prestructured by their cognitive and attitudinal apparatus. Second, political predispositions (i.e., partisanship and political ideology) are a key factor in selective exposure to and perception of political communication. One question that follows, though – and we have pointed to it above –, is whether selective exposure works uniformly for people of different political ideologies. In the next section, we present an argument for why we think that while political ideology has been frequently cited as a condition of political communication effects (see the studies presented above), some

© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 227 important differences between groups of differing political ideological orientation have been curiously neglected and should be taken in account more in future media effects research. To do so, theories, models and findings from social psychology need to be systematically incorporated in our models of effects in political communication.

3 Political Ideology, Cognitive Style, and Differential Reinforcement

What does it mean to adhere to a particular political ideology? Of course, it entails greater or lesser agreement with certain policy opinions. Accordingly, political ideology has been utilized by much selective exposure research as an indicator of whether or not people are experiencing affirmation or dissonance when confronted with a particular political message. ResearchMaterial in social psychology, however, has shown that there is more to political ideology than commitment to certain values or agreement to certain policy options. People of different ideologies also differ systematically in terms of basic cognitive dispositions; differences that we argue are likely consequential for the reception of political communication. Specifically, such differences in cognitive style might bear an influence on the mechanismsgeschütztes of selective exposure and perception. Social psychological studies of ideology have shown that politically conservative people exhibit a stronger need for cognitive closure than left-leaning people; they are also less open towards new situations and experiences and put greater confidence in authorities (e.g., Chirumbolo, Areni, & Sensales, 2004). Studies that theoretically link people’s beliefs with underlying cognitive needs and dispositions often pursue what has been labeled the »motivated social cognition approach« (Jost et al., 2003) or the »cognitive conservatism approach« (Vanurheberrechtlich Hiel, Pandelaere, & Duriez, 2004), both of which are concerned with the consequences of need for cognitive closure levels of people for their political orientations. Chirumbolo (2002) defines need for cognitive closure as »a cognitive-motivational content independent construct, defined as preference for definitive order and structure, and desire for firm or stable knowledge« (p. 604). Referring to previous studies, Chirumbolo adds that »need for cognitive closure affects the extent of information processing itself, the seeking and processing of new information, the generation of alternative hypotheses, the tolerance of ambiguity in perception tasks, and many other social and

228 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur interpersonal phenomena like resistance to persuasion, rejection of opinion deviates, impression formation and stereotypes and several group processes« (p. 604). In his study, Chirumbolo investigated the relationship between need for cognitive closure, authoritarianism and political orientation. He found that need for cognitive closure and authoritarianism are associated with right-wing political orientations and that this relationship is linear. A study by Kemmelmeier (1997) mirrors these findings. Here, politically conservative members of a sample of German students displayed a stronger dispositional need for cognitive closure than their left-leaning counterparts. Again, the relationship was found to be linear. Another study by Crowson (2009b) showed that dangerous and competi- tive world beliefs in people were significantly associated with right-wing authoritarianism for study participants. Right-wing authoritarianism, in turn, mediated effects of these differences in cognitive style on opinions about US anti-terrorism policies. Material In a similar study, Jost and his colleagues tested different theoretical models to examine the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of political orientation. Their results show that »uncertainty avoidance and threat management are both associated with conservative (rather than liberal) opinions […] add[ing] to a growing body of evidence suggesting that psychological needs and motives pertaining to the managementgeschütztes of uncertainty and threat are related to individuals’ degree of attraction to liberal versus conservative ideologies« (Jost et al., 2007: 1004). In yet another study of political ideology and related psychological dispositions, Thorisdottir et al. (2007) drew on data from the 2002 European Social Survey and found that traditionalism, acceptance of inequality, the need to follow rules and an authoritarian personality style are strongly connected in right-wing adherents in Western Europe. On the whole,urheberrechtlich then, empirical research provides strong evidence of systematic relations between political orientations of people (on the traditional left- right spectrum) and basic cognitive dispositions, some of which were addressed by the studies referenced above.4 But how do these cognitive differ-

...... 4 A concomitant question which is important has been addressed in personality research is whether the degree to which cognitive differences between political conservatives and liberals/left-leaning people occur depends on individual agreement to specific values incorporated in these general ideologies. For example, there is some evidence that cultural conservatism reflects a general need for closure and obedience in authorities to a greater degree than does economic conservatism (see, e.g., Cornelis & Van Hiel, 2006; Crowson, 2009a; Kossowska & Van Hiel, 2003).

© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 229 ences between ideological groups relate to political communication processes? We suggest that, given the occupation of selective exposure and perception research with dissonance reduction, confirmation and similarity biases, ac- counting for need for closure (and related cognitive style variables) would add to the explanatory value of its theories. A pioneering attempt at bringing together cognitive style and selective exposure was made by Lavine, Lodge, and Freitas (2005) who investigated the influence of threat on people high and low on authoritarianism and their selective exposure behavior in an experimental setting. Authoritarianism as a concept is closely related to conservatism and regarded as an »ideological response to reduce high levels of perceived threat and anxiety« (p. 220). Results show that under threat high-authoritarians mostly select attitude- congruent information whereas low-authoritarians do not. We take this finding as a useful hint for our study to the extent that it suggests that cognitive differences between people with right- and left-wingMaterial ideologies may affect their selective exposure behavior. We propose to step beyond this initial evidence and to further integrate research on the cognitive antecedents of political ideologies and research on selective exposure and selective perception. Specifically, future research would do well to consider the ways in which cognitive characteristics of different ideological groups might lead to differentialgeschütztes degrees of partisan reinforcement as a result of political communication processes. Such efforts would open up new perspectives for both theory and empirical analysis. Theoretically, there is a need to develop models and hypotheses involving specific personality traits and cognitive styles associated with political ideological dispositions as intraindividual factors in the reception of political communication. Further, the interactions of these internal factors with situational and media-specific (external) factors are in need of investigation. Here, relevant characteristicsurheberrechtlich of media form and media content (i.e., its objects and the framing of these objects) need to be considered. Relevant situational factors encompass the degree of »objective threat« with regard to a politically relevant question (see the experimental manipulation made by Lavine, Lodge, & Freitas 2005). For example, more research is needed that compares different cognitive and attitudinal domains (e.g., problem perceptions, policy support, stereotyping) with regard to the degree to which differential reinforcement through political communication occurs in them. Empirically, considering the role that cognitive styles such as personal need for

230 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur closure play in the reception process would allow us to predict more precisely for whom cognitive – and, by extension, attitudinal – reinforcement due to selective exposure to and perception of mediated political communication will occur in what situations. The »new era of minimal effects« heralded by Ben- nett and Iyengar (2008), then, might turn out to be more accurately described as a «new era of differential minimal effects” if we walk down this road of inquiry. The development of a motivated social cognition model of political communication will need to be the next step researchers take on this road. The immediate methodological consequence of the ideas presented here is a need to further integrate measures of cognitive style into media effect studies in general and research on selective exposure or perception in particular. Many such scales have been developed and tested in psychometric research and are available for use in tests of refined theoretical models of political communication effects. The Need for Closure Scale (NFCS) has been in widespread use ever since its initial validation (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994),Material and is itself a multidimensional measure which can be broken down into several facet scales (see Cornelis & Van Hiel, 2006; and, for a critical assessment, Neuberg, Judice, & West, 1997). Other cognitive style variables or epistemic motivations for which tested scales exist include personal need for structure (e.g., Schaller et al., 1995), openness to experience (e.g., McCrae, 1996), intolerance of ambiguity (e.g., Sidanius, 1978), uncertainty geschütztesavoidance (e.g., McGregor et al., 2001), and need for order (e.g., Jost et al., 2003). Thus, methodological tools to accommodate the kind of theoretical extensions of political communication effect research proposed in this article are at the disposal of researchers. To sum up, we have argued here that there are few reasons to believe that all political partisans are created equal – and we have suggested some initial steps to theorize and methodologically account for the role of partisan inequalities in political communication processes in future research.

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