New paper out: The Left-Liberal Skew of Western Media
So it's finally out! Out big meta-analysis of journalist voting patterns.
Kirkegaard, E. O. W., Pallesen, J., Elgaard, E., & Carl, N. (2021). The left-liberal skew of Western media. Journal of Psychological Research, 3(3).
We gathered survey data on journalists’ political views in 17 Western countries. We then matched these data to outcomes from national elections, and constructed metrics of journalists’ relative preference for different political parties. Compared to the general population of voters, journalists prefer parties that have more left-wing positions overall (r’s -.47 to -.53, depending on the metric used), and that are associated with certain ideologies, namely environmentalism, feminism, social liberalism, socialism, and support for the European Union. We used Bayesian model averaging to assess the validity of the predictors in multivariate models. We found that, of the ideology tags in our dataset, ‘conservative’ (negative), ‘nationalist’ (negative) and ‘green’ (positive) were the most consistent predictors with nontrivial effect sizes. We also computed estimates of the skew of journalists' political views in different countries. Overall, our results indicate that the Western media has a left-liberal skew.
The main plots speak for themselves. This one shows political position of a party and how much journalists vote for it compared to general population:
Quantified differently:
And for which kind of party it is using the English Wikipedia’s ideology tags:
And our model that summarizes the flow of information in society:
Video
One hour video walkthrough!
All data files you can download too! https://osf.io/6uvnu/files/