Understanding Foreign Policy Public Opinion. Examining the determinants, structure and robustness of individual attitudes
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MSCA-19-Picone04
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Beschrijving van het project
The relationship between citizens, the press and politics has dramatically changed over the past decades, from a CNN effect in the 1990s to a Youtube effect in the 2000s and, more recently, the diffusion of fake news. The numerous (r)evolutions in communication and information technologies has decreased the dependency on official sources and diminished the gatekeeping role of news media in informing the public and shaping public opinion. Along with these evolutions, public opinion has become the target of manipulations and campaigns of misinformation from specific groups in society and even from external powers. Hence, this research project aims to examine how public opinion regarding foreign policy and international politics is organized and structures, what determines citizens’ opinions and what makes certain individuals’ opinions and attitudes more coherent and robust than others? To examine these questions, this project proposes to examine foreign policy opinion and attitude formation among the general and student populations. Surveying students will provide us with the unique opportunity to track individuals over a longer period of time (three years) and understand what forms their opinion and what makes their opinion more robust to manipulations, focusing specifically on formal education, personality, norms, values and heuristics. Surveys among the general population will allow us to compare and generalize these findings.
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SMIT Research Group
SMIT stands for Studies in Media, Innovation and Technology. Our research group is part of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and imec.
Promotor Ike Picone teaches and researches disruptions on the crossroad of journalism, technological innovations and democracy. The thread within his research is the study of news use practices within the broad field of journalism studies. More precisely, his work focuses on ‘productive’ use of new(s) media, conceptualized within his research as self-publication. The scope is to understand how people participate to media as a social practice, and what motivations and thresholds play a role in shaping this practice. His research topics include user participation to online news, the changing relationship between news audiences and journalists and the role of new media;in the emergence of deliberative public spheres.
Dr. Ike Picone is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Senior Researcher within the research group IMEC-SMIT. The threadwithin his research is the study of news use practices within the broad field of journalism studies. More precisely, his work focuses on ‘productive’ use of new(s) media, conceptualized within his research as self-publication. The scope is to understand how people participate to media as a socialpractice, and what motivations and thresholds play a role in shaping this practice.
His research topics include user participation to online news, the changing relationship between news audiences and journalists and the role of new media in the emergence of deliberative public spheres. Within Studies in Media, Innovation and Technology research group (SMIT), he is part of senior staffand responsible for developing the ‘Tackling Disinformation’ research strand, one of the priorities of SMIT’s strategic research agenda for 2019-2020. He is part of the international team working on the renowned yearly Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. His expertise has been acknowledged amongst others through his membership of the Flemish Council for Journalism and the temporary expert group on Fake News of former Belgian Minister of Digital Agenda Alexander De Croo. He has been vocal about the issue of disinformation in the Belgian media. He is also a member of the Council for Journalism of Flanders (Belgium).