Political Comedy Shows and Public Participation in Politics

Abstract

… the ascension of [Jon] Stewart and The Daily Show into the public eye is no laughing matter … Stewart's daily dose of political parody characterized by asinine alliteration leads to a ‘holier than thou’ attitude toward our national leaders. People who possess the wit, intelligence, and self-awareness of viewers of The Daily Show would never choose to enter the political fray full of ‘buffoons and idiots.’ (Kalin, 2006, p. A19) A growing body of scholarly literature examines the implications of entertainment-oriented ‘soft news’ television programs for democratic politics. Much of this research suggests that exposure to such programs can, under certain conditions, influence public attention to politics (Baum, 2002), public knowledge about politics (Baum, 2003; Prior, 2003), public opinion (Baum, 2003; Young, 2004b; Moy, Xenos, & Hess, 2006), and political participation (Moy, Xenos, & Hess, 2005). Drawing on this literature, several recent studies (Young 2004a; Hollander, 2005) have considered the potential effects of exposure to television comedy programs that focus on political humor (e.g., Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart). Most importantly for our purposes, Baumgartner and Morris (2006) have argued that exposure to political comedy programs such as The Daily Show ‘may dampen participation … by contributing to a sense of political alienation from the political process’ (pp. 362–363). In this study, we challenge the notion that political comedy programs undermine political participation by showing that exposure to such programs is positively associated with some forms of political participation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 119 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.