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The purpose of this study is to examine, in the context of online news use, the predictive values of two factors: perceived bias in traditional media and preference for partisan news.

This study used data collected as part of the Pew Internet and American Life Project between December 28, 2009, and January 19, 2010. The data were analyzed using linear regression analysis.

The findings provide evidence of the values of two potentially significant predictors of online news use: a perception of bias in traditional media and preference for partisan news. In addition, higher levels of political partisanship were shown to intensify the positive effect of perceived bias in traditional media on online news use in new media outlets, reinforcing the impact of preference for partisan news on participatory online news use.

Depending on individual decisions, the internet can either help to empower deliberative democracy (where diverse and different voices coexist) or lead to an extremely polarized society.

With the explosive growth of the internet as a news source, media scholars have explored the factors that encourage people to rely on the internet for news and information. Nevertheless, certain attributes of online news consumption originating from individual attitudes about and perceptions of the media environment remain underspecified. This research helps advance an understanding of the types of people who seek news online and how they use various sources.

This research replicated earlier research done in non‐partisan school district elections, concerning the effect of school board member incumbent defeat on non‐voluntary superintendent turnover. In earlier research incumbent defeat was related to involuntary superintendent turnover at the .001 level. It was felt that the partisan (Democratic‐Republican) nature of school board elections in Pennsylvania might change the nature of this relationship and offer some insight into the effect of partisan politics on the local politics of education. Based on the research reported in this article it does not appear that partisan elections have the predicted influence on the politics of local school districts. No partisan predictors supplied a more significant relationship with non‐voluntary superintendent turnover than the general category of incumbent defeat regardless of partisan relationships.

The political behavior of founders, families and their firms in the form of campaign contributions has not been explored by family business scholars. Yet partisan and ideological campaign contributions raise a range of governance issues and hold implications for myriad stakeholders, including investors, employees, customers and the public. The purpose of this paper compares and contrasts the campaign contributions of founder- and family-controlled firms relative to managerially governed firms and develops theoretical explanations for observed differences.

This paper develops a “principal owner” hypothesis based upon a typology of firm ownership characteristics (founder/family control or not; publicly traded or privately held). This hypothesis is tested by multivariate empirical analyses of the campaign contributions of 251 firms across 14 industries with four types of ownership structures.

Founder- and family-controlled firms are more partisan and ideological relative to other firms in their industry and this finding is consistent across industries. Founders and family members influence political behavior, including in publicly traded firms.

Given potential controversies raised by ideological and partisan campaign contributions and the unpredictable returns on political investment, it behooves founders and their family members to assess the impact of their political behavior on the business and on key stakeholders.

This paper is the first to raise governance issues related to founders’ and families’ political spending and develops original insights into the ideological and political behavior of these businesses.

Partisan news media, which often publish extremely biased, one-sided or even false news, are gaining popularity world-wide and represent a major societal issue. Due to a growing number of such media, a need for automatic detection approaches is of high demand. Automatic detection relies on various indicators (e.g. content characteristics) to identify new partisan media candidates and to predict their level of partisanship. The aim of the research is to investigate to a deeper extent whether it would be appropriate to rely on the hyperlinks as possible indicators for better automatic partisan news media detection.

The authors utilized hyperlink network analysis to study the hyperlinks of partisan and mainstream media. The dataset involved the hyperlinks of 18 mainstream media and 15 partisan media in Slovakia and Czech Republic. More than 171 million domain pairs of inbound and outbound hyperlinks of selected online news media were collected with Ahrefs tool, analyzed and visualized with Gephi software. Additionally, 300 articles covering COVID-19 from both types of media were selected for content analysis of hyperlinks to verify the reliability of quantitative analysis and to provide more detailed analysis.

The authors conclude that hyperlinks are reliable indicators of media affinity and linking patterns could contribute to partisan news detection. The authors found out that especially the incoming links with dofollow attribute to news websites are reliable indicators for assessing the type of media, as partisan media rarely receive links with dofollow attribute from mainstream media. The outgoing links are not such reliable indicators as both mainstream and partisan media link to mainstream sources similarly.

In contrast to the extensive amount of research aiming at fake news detection within a piece of text or multimedia content (e.g. news articles, social media posts), the authors shift to characterization of the whole news media. In addition, the authors did a geographical shift from more researched US-based media to so far under-researched European context, particularly Central Europe. The results and conclusions can serve as a guide how to derive new features for an automatic detection of possibly partisan news media by means of artificial intelligence (AI).

The peer review history for this article is available at the following link: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2020-0441.

Purpose – Although scholars have long been interested in how social movements use mass media to forward their goals, sociological research almost exclusively focuses on the ability of activist groups to get their ideas and organizations in general audience, mainstream media coverage. This paper contributes to a more systematic understanding of media coverage outcomes by broadening the range of outlets considered relevant to political discourse. In addition to mainstream venues, we consider conservative and liberal/left outlets in our analysis of social movement organization media coverage.

Method – Using negative binomial regression, we analyze how organizational characteristics, organizational frames, political elites, and event type affect the rates of social movement organization media coverage in mainstream and partisan news venues.

Findings – We find that the independent variables play very different roles in mainstream and partisan media coverage outcomes. Specifically, while organizational characteristics and frames often enhance the media coverage outcomes of activist groups in mainstream venues, political elites have no effect at all. In contrast, organizational characteristics and frames do not affect social movement media coverage in partisan outlets, whereas political elites and event type do.

Originality of the paper – Conceptually, this research broadens how scholars think about the relationship between social movement groups and mass media as well as the factors that influence media outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of left Brazilian political parties and partisan disruption on the homicide rate in Brazil.

The authors use panel data for the states between the years 1980 and 2011. The database used is an unbalanced panel covering a sample of 27 Brazilian states over 32 years, 1980-2011, totaling about 855 observations.

It is estimated that these two political factors are sources that have connection to the increased level of violence in Brazil. These analyses provide several important results. First, partisan disruption is associated with a higher homicide rate, compared to non-partisan disruption. The results from the panel also suggest that left-parties in government have a positive impact on homicide, compared to non-left-parties.

Information regarding premeditated homicides (CID-BR-9 database) is available for all Brazilian states, and may be tabulated from the same micro-data at any level of aggregation. Some of the well-known problems regarding the choice of this variable are as follows. First, deaths resulting from wounds are sometimes included in the statistics whether wounds were intentionally inflicted or not. In addition, some incidents end up not being registered because certain deaths are not reported. This tends to occur more frequently in rural areas. Fortunately, this second problem does not appear to be too significant, as under-registry of deaths due to external causes is much lower than the amount resulting from natural causes (see, e.g. Cano and Santos, 2000). In addition, this problem may be controlled if under-registry remains stable over time by applying fixed effects to the panel data.

The main Brazilian political parties diverge on the causes of crime and how criminals should be punished. For example, in Brazil, the minimum age for one individual to be punished with imprisonment is 18 years old. Practices crimes for young people between 12 and 18 implies only in socio-educational measures. Given the high level of violence in Brazil, there is a bill being debated in the parliament that proposes to reduce the age to 16 years. Based on the research, 90 percent of the population approves the reduction of age to 16 years. However, the majority of parliament is opposed to changing the law. In general, the more conservative parties are favorable to changing the law.

These divergent postures can be associated with the ideological essence or to belief system of each political party. Political parties have the potential capacity of changing crime trends through economic and social policies as well as by applying stronger sanctions against crime. Given the law enforcement system, the cycle of crime in Brazil may be related to the profile of the political party elected.

The authors assume the hypothesis that the current Brazilian multi-partisan system has an incentive system in which politicians do not respond adequately to the basic wishes of voters. Among such desires, the authors emphasize public safety. This paper evaluates the empirical effect of partisan disruption on homicide rate.

While psychology, sociology and communications studies hypothesise a range of independent variables that might impact on individuals’ acceptance or rejection of rumours, almost all studies of the phenomenon have taken place in environments featuring notable, and sometimes very deep, partisan divisions, making it almost impossible to isolate the impact of partisan influences on views on different rumour subjects. This study aims to remove the possibility of partisan influences on readers of internet rumours by testing the impact of independent demographic variables in China, a one-party state with no overt partisan divisions. The study provides an opportunity to strip away the influence of ideology and see whether this factor may have coloured previous studies on susceptibility to believe rumours.

An empirical study was used to examine belief in false and true online rumours in a non-partisan environment. A large sample group was presented with rumours across four subject areas and respondents’ conclusions and demographic information was then subject to logistic regression analysis to identify relationships between factors and ability to identify the veracity of online rumours.

Unexpectedly, the regression analysis revealed no statistically significant nexus between many independent demographic variables and patterns of believing or disbelieving rumours. In other cases, a statistically significant relationship was revealed, but only to a limited degree. The results suggest that once the role of partisanship in explaining the proliferation of and belief in false rumours and the ability to identify true ones is removed from consideration, no other independent variables enjoy convincing links with rumour belief.

The study tests in China, a jurisdiction featuring a non-partisan environment, the impact of independent variables on media users’ belief in a wide range of rumours.

The purpose of this paper is to explore peace protest as a form of institutional work aimed at supporting one institution and disrupting another.

The authors utilized walking ethnography (28 miles in 18 h while conducting 25 walking interviews) and digital media analysis (news reports, social media and electronic communication).

Walking participants engaged in multiple types of institutional work aimed at maintaining the Good Friday Agreement and disrupting partisan violence. The institutional work left no lasting impact on either institution.

The paper conceptualizes two competing institutions and situates the dual institutional work of Lyra's Walk in the post-conflict context of Northern Ireland. The study contributes to understanding formality and multiplicity in institutional work research.