This essay appeared in the 2021 Fueling Discovery special section of the Wisconsin State Journal on 10/17/21. View the full 2021 Fueling Discovery PDF here.
About the author
Michael W. Wagner is a Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves at the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership, the Elections Research Center and the Mass Communication Research Center. Wagner’s research and teaching focus on the ways that mediated information flows through society to influence how well democracy works.
When it comes to civic life, Wisconsin has been precursor, test-bed and microcosm of what was happening, and would happen, across our divided country.
Contentious political battles between rural and urban citizens, protests connected to the Black Lives Matter movement, and disagreements about COVID-19 policies contribute to nearly half of Wisconsinites reporting that they have stopped talking politics with someone because of a political disagreement, while another 20 percent have outright ended a friendship over politics.
Over the same decade, our research team has been observing Wisconsin, trying to understand how political life here has become so contentious, divided and chaotic.
We want to shed light on behaviors and practices that help maintain democracy and renew civic life in our state. Understanding these fissures — their causes and effects — is a critical first step toward combatting disinformation and rebuilding a functional society.
We examine multiple layers of the communication ecology together—from newspapers and television to talk radio and individual conversations to social media and mobile technology—and study how their interactions shape what people believe, want, and do.
What have we learned? In short, information matters. Experiments, surveys and in-depth focus group interviews reveal that what our leaders say and how they say it shapes our attitudes and who we blame for our problems. Our content analyses show that our news media choose to cover ideological extremists, skewing our perceptions of the divides between us.
Our harvesting of billions of tweets and thousands of public-facing Facebook posts shows that social media can be a place where toxic attitudes and dangerous misinformation spread with the ferocity and devastating consequences of a wildfire.
Moreover, our attitudes about the information we consume matters. One set of experiments we conducted showed that while journalistic fact-checks can help people become more accurate in their understanding of what is verifiably true, fact-checks are also perceived to be biased, potentially diminishing trust in the very news media doing the fact-checking.
Another survey experiment we conducted revealed that people think bad news—their preferred presidential candidate trailing in the polls—is biased while the same bad news, but for the other party’s candidate, is unbiased.
We have also learned that information interacts with the contexts people live in. Linking county-level economic data with public opinion surveys, we found that when economic situations improved in Wisconsin counties, people living in those counties developed more polarized attitudes about leaders and political groups than those in counties that were hurting. That is, when things are good, many of us retreat to our partisan corners and when things are bad, we are willing to look across the aisle for help.
Besides hard times, what might help turn the tide of partisan polarization and political contentiousness?
At the individual level, our team’s work suggests that a willingness to listen to others, efforts to foster an “accuracy motivation” (learning what is true) as compared to a “directional motivation” (looking for evidence that my side is right), a balanced information diet, and a willingness to admit what we don’t know are critical factors that can improve what people know about politics and promote support for democratic processes and outcomes.
At the institutional level, there are many popular things our leaders can do to help rebuild civil society. For example, the public strongly prefers that our leaders make redistricting nonpartisan, ensure that the rules of governing do not change based upon who wins an election, and give a voice to those who are not in the majority.
We have shown that Wisconsin has been ground zero for the national divide. Our research also suggests it can be a leader for reknitting the civic fabric as well.