Audience capture, selective exposure, affective assimilation or ideological sorting? Polarisation of climate politics under low media-party parallelism

Abstract

Studies often attribute the polarisation of climate politics in majoritarian democracies to differing treatment of climate change by conservative and liberal media. How then does such polarisation occur in a system, where mainstream media do not systematically align with party positions? Focusing on how users in different ideological blocs posted and commented on news articles on Finnish Twitter between 2015 and 2023, we address four mechanisms: audience capture, where outlets adapt to increasingly differentiated audiences, reinforcing their divergence through feedback between audience engagement and editorial incentives; selective exposure, where users post ideologically congruent articles from the same outlets; affective assimilation, where users communicate identical content with ideology-consistent valence; and ideological sorting, where identity-driven alignment structures news-posting behaviour across multiple issues. Bayesian regression models indicate increasing divergence in outlet choice, with conservative-leaning users posting more tabloid content, in line with audience capture, and partial support for selective exposure, as within-outlet article posting becomes increasingly differentiated. Valence divergence increases only slightly over time, providing moderate support for affective assimilation, while issue-specific communities show weak alignment with blocs despite convergence over time. Our work refines theories of media effects beyond majoritarian democracies and contributes to understanding the current impasse in climate politics.