Newly published in the journal Political Behavior is Prof. Theodoridis' paper "Seeing Spots: Partisanship, Negativity, and the Conditional Receipt of Campaign Advertisements." Congratulations to Prof. Theodoridis and his co-author!
The paper studies how voters select what media they wish to consume, which the authors term the "conditional receipt" of information. Specifically, the study teases out how partisanship interacts with the party source and the tone of campaign messages, driving voters to either seek out or avoid information. Using an experimental research design in which subjects were able to selectively engage with campaign advertisements from the 2012 Presidential election, partisans are found to avoid out-party campaign messages, but no more so for positive than negative messages.
