The jury considered articles published in 16 academic journals that cover the field of political communication, and highlighted Rojas’ theoretical development and methodological implementation in "Corrective" Actions in the Public Sphere: How Perceptions of Media and Media Effects Shape Political Behavior, published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research last year.
This study shows how the so-called third-person effect (a general tendency to overstate the influence of media on others, while minimizing the impact on oneself) and the hostile media effect (propensity of people, particularly partisans, to consider objective journalistic coverage as biased against their views), predict a range of political behaviors that seek to "correct" the potential impact of those messages seen as influential and contrary to your own position.
These "corrective" actions, such as writing commenting online news articles, participating in political rallies, signing petitions and trying to convince people in your social networks to vote a certain way, seek to enrich the public sphere, but raise the question of whether, being based on a series of perceptual biases (third-person and hostile media effect), they really enrich or impoverish public debate.
The research from which this article originated was conducted in Colombia during 2006, with support of the Graduate School annual research competition, and is part of a longitudinal project of the Center for Communication and Democracy at UW-Madison, where Rojas serves as Associate Director, in Partnership with the Center for Political Communication at Universidad Externado de Colombia.