Latest publications

Previous research shows effects of the advice from voting advice applications (VAAs) on party choice. These effects could be spurious because of common origins of the obtained advice and party choice in antecedent factors like prior voting, issue voting and campaign effects. Here three-wave panel surveys and media content data for the Dutch national election campaigns of 2010 and…

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Advertisers are increasingly monitoring people’s online behavior and using the information collected to show people individually targeted advertisements. This phenomenon is called online behavioral advertising (OBA). Although advertisers can benefit from OBA, the practice also raises concerns about privacy. Therefore, OBA has received much attention from advertisers, consumers, policymakers, and scholars. Despite this attention, there is neither a strong…

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In every democracy, established political parties are challenged by other parties. Established parties react in various ways to other parties’ presence. A key hypothesis in the relevant literature is that established parties can decrease another party’s electoral support by parroting it, i.e. adopting its core policy issue position. This article argues, and demonstrates empirically, that this hypothesised effect mainly…

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We study the personalization of voting behaviour in European Parliament elections. We argue that information from the media is crucial for providing linkages between candidates and voters. Moreover, we contend that candidates can serve as information short-cuts given the complexity of European Union politics. We use a four-wave Dutch panel survey and a media study that enable us to…

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Addressing the call to move beyond a simple genre classification of TV shows as either substantive (hard) news or non-substantive (soft) infotainment, we propose using social media reactions to determine a program’s political relevance. Such an approach provides information that goes beyond genre or content characteristics and reflects what really reaches an audience. Analyzing tweets about two Dutch talk…

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