The impact of watching political comedy on political opinions

• Autor(a) principal: Brás, Tiago Nunes Aníbal Sousa
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/26798
• topic: Political comedy; Political opinions; Issue salience; Primacy and recency effects; Comédia política; Opiniões políticas; Saliência dos temas; Efeitos de primazia e de recência

Politics and comedy have shared a close relationship for millennia. This has led to the impacts of political comedy being widely studied, especially since the late 20th century and the widespread growth of the presence of political satire on television. The effects have been mostly studied on political participation, political efficacy, political knowledge, and evaluations of elected politicians and candidates, especially at the level of personality. On the other hand, research on the effects of opinions on political issues, such as public policies or politically relevant topics, is almost non-existent. With this dissertation, I tried to contribute to filling this gap, while stimulatingly filling another one: contrary to the majority of research on the effects of exposure to political comedy, this research is focused on Portugal and not in the United States. In concrete, an experience was made centered on two topics: euthanasia and the nurses’ strike of 2019. Some participants watched comedy videos, while others watched news about those issues. The results show that exposure to the comedy content influenced opinions on the topics, as the participants changed their opinions according to the positions taken by the comedians. In addition, this happened in both issues, regardless of their salience. Three weeks after viewing the two videos, it was possible to notice that these effects were still observable. On the other hand, recency effects were not observed, with the evidence being more favorable to the primacy hypothesis.