The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect

Over the last two decades, as the number of media choices available to consumers has exploded, so too have worries over self-selection into media audiences. Some fear greater apathy, others heightened polarization. In this paper, we shed light on the latter possibility. We identify the impact of access to broadband Internet on affective polarization by exploiting differences in broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations (ROW). We merge state-level regulation data with county-level broadband penetration data and a large-N sample of survey data from 2004 to 2008 and find that access to broadband Internet increases partisan hostility. The effect occurs in both years and is stable across levels of political interest. We also find that access to broadband Internet boosts partisans’ consumption of partisan media, a likely cause of increased polarization. Replication material can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LWED0F. We would like to thank Kevin Arceneaux, William Jacoby, Gregory Martin, Markus Prior, Jesse Shapiro, Sean Westwood, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Over the past fifty years, partisans have come to increasingly dislike each other (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes 2012), so much so, that today implicit partisan prejudice exceeds implicit racial prejudice (Iyengar and Westwood 2014; see also Chambers, Schlenker and Collisson 2013). Party cues now constrain social and interpersonal relations —partisans trust copartisans more than supporters of the opposing party (Carlin and Love 2013; Iyengar and Westwood 2014; see also Hetherington and Rudolph 2014) and large proportions of both Republicans and Democrats are troubled by the prospect of a family member marrying a supporter of the main opposing party (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes 2012; see also Huber and Malhotra 2013). Over the same period that partisan animus has been increasing, the reach of partisan information sources has been expanding. The broadcast news audience of 1975 could “choose” between three largely indistinguishable and devoutly non-partisan network newscasts. Today, aside from a broad array of nonpartisan news sources, including network news, viewers can also tune into “all news” partisan cable channels, partisan “news” shows on numerous other television channels, including two prominent shows on Comedy Central, or one of the countless partisan sources available online. The reach of partisan media is not limited to discretionary exposure, i.e., those that choose that tune in. Increasingly, even the politically disinterested are exposed to nontrivial doses of partisan news. Online social networks today form the backbone of many Americans’ daily information environment. And due to network partisan homophily (Halberstam and Knight 2014; Lewis, Gonzalez and Kaufman 2012), many apolitical individuals find themselves in networks with at least one politically active “friend” who is apt to recirculate news reports and commentary (see Halberstam and Knight 2014; Messing 2013). In fact, by some metrics, Facebook is now a major source of traffic to online news sites (Pew Research Center 2014). In this paper, we focus on affective polarization or interparty animus rather than ideological polarization. Evidence in favor of increasing ideological polarization in the electorate, however, is mixed (e.g., Abramowitz 2010; Fiorina, Abrams and Pope 2005).