Stuart Soroka

About

Explore research on political communication, media, and public opinion by UCLA Professor Stuart Soroka, focusing on negativity in news and democracy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Medicine
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Management science
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Information and Democracy

  2022 · 49 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Around the world, there are increasing concerns about the accuracy of media coverage. It is vital in representative democracies that citizens have access to reliable information about what is happening in government policy, so that they can form meaningful preferences and hold politicians accountable. Yet much research and conventional wisdom questions whether the necessary information is available, consumed, and understood. This study is the first large-scale empirical investigation into the fr…

  DOI

• Media Reflect! Policy, the Public, and the News

  American Political Science Review · 2023-09-28 · 28 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Mass media are often portrayed as having large effects on democratic politics. Media content is not simply an exogenous influence on publics and policymakers, however. There is reason to think that this content reflects publics and politics as much as—if not more than—it affects them. This letter examines those possibilities, focusing on interactions between news coverage, budgetary policy, and public preferences in the defense, welfare, and health-care domains in the United States. Results indi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Political communication

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-03-03 · 17 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Psychophysiology of News Avoidance: Does Negative Affect Drive Both Attention and <i>In</i> attention to News?

  Journalism Studies · 2024-02-12 · 12 citations

  article

  Technological change has produced a high-choice media environment in which selective exposure and news avoidance are increasingly feasible and common. The literature has suggested several correlates of news avoidance, and recent work has particularly emphasized the potential significance of negative affective responses to news. This paper argues for the use of psychophysiological methods to better understand how emotional responses drive news avoidance. In doing so, we question the assumption—ev…

  PublisherDOI

• Critical Race Theory: How Policy Language Differentially Engages Symbolic Racism and Partisanship

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-03-26 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Recent years have seen a marked shift in the salience and politicization of any incorporation of race into teaching at the elementary and secondary levels. “Critical race theory” (CRT) has become a prominent feature of the current debate, even as there is a good deal of misunderstanding about what CRT actually is. Drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment, we consider the impact of the phrase “critical race theory” in activating both racial biases and partisan identity. Our expectation was t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Mass Media and Representative Democracy

  NSF · $151k · 2017–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher Wlezien

  The University of Texas at Austin

  87 shared

• Patrick Fournier

  33 shared

• Lilach Nir

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  23 shared

• Shanto Iyengar

  Stanford University

  20 shared

• Allison Harell

  Université du Québec à Montréal

  20 shared

• Richard Johnston

  17 shared

• Keith Banting

  Queen's University

  15 shared

• Toril Aalberg

  Norwegian University of Science and Technology

  11 shared

Education

• PhD, Political Science

  University of British Columbia

  2000

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Martie Haseltonh-46
• Rick Daleh-45
• Lynn Vavreckh-32