SCM Studies in Communication and Media

To understand populism, it is crucial to understand populist political communication. We investigate how politicians across the political spectrum employ populist communication in different non-institutionalized communication arenas. Populism is...

In this research report, I investigated which (media) sources were shared on 122 AfD-related Facebook pages during the year 2016. Results show that mainstream media outlets were not absent from these discussions. The established media sources Welt...

Popularity cues, such as likes and shares, point to mainly positive user reactions. On an aggregated level, they either indicate relevance assignments or endorsements of online items, particularly in the context of political communication. Second,...

Research on recovery from stress demonstrated that entertaining movies increase psychological detachment and relaxation. In addition, entertainment experiences foster feelings of vitality and thereby contribute to well-being. The current study...

Grounded in Giddens’ structuration theory and using Bourdieu’s analytical tools this paper argues that Karl Bücher’s launch of Europe’s first communication department at Leipzig University in 1916 had a structural impact on the...

Good research practice faces both ethical and methodological challenges that cannot always be met at the same time. The paper systematically relates research ethics to methodological issues discussing potential dilemmas. It sheds light on...

Although research has shown that political actors benefit from appealing to values that resonate with their audience’s preferences, it remains an open question to what extent this can be exploited. How do individuals react to value appeals that...

While the analysis of national - and increasingly European - elections is a longstanding tradition in political communication research, the analysis of regional elections is still an understudied research topic. Those elections take the centre stage...

In recent years, the number of users on online physician rating sites has increased continuously. According to exemplification theory, user comments have a strong influence on individual judgments. Visualized base-rate information can constrain...

User discussions of journalistic online news are a sensitive issue. First, most users do not seem to be motivated to comment on articles. Second, as far as discussions emerge, they seldom aim to create mutual understanding. Since this threatens the...

Newsrooms are still searching for ways to manage user comments because of both a desire for professional distance from their audiences and a lack of analytical tools. This paper presents findings from our exploratory, interdisciplinary study in...

Uncivil and impolite user comments diminish the quality of deliberative discussions in the comment sections of news sites. This study investigates how users engage against such comments. Replying, disliking, and flagging are distinguished as...

This article develops a model to explain contradictory findings on the effects of repeated exposure to persuasive communication. The model’s starting point is the repetition frequency of a given stimulus. This determines - in interaction with...

On the basis of four focus group discussions (N = 32) that were conducted in June 2015, the present study investigates the attribution and assessment of corporate responsibility by citizens. To obtain more differentiated insight into the attribution...

On contemporary online news sites, readers are simultaneously exposed to journalistic articles and social reactions toward these messages. Two online experiments (N = 252) addressed whether negative user reactions can attenuate the persuasive...