Not My Horse: Voter Preferences, Media Sources, and Hostile Poll Reports in Election Campaigns

The interplay between news coverage of preelection polls and voters' assessments of bias has been well documented. Less known, but theoretically more important, is how it may play out in a media context that highly parallels political camps. The 2012 Taiwanese presidential election provides an ideal case to observe how voters' perception of hostile poll coverage might be affected by media partisanship in election campaigns. Against this backdrop, we first confirmed that voters reported greater perceptions of hostile bias when seeing disagreeable poll results. The polarized and divided media setting further shaped voters' reactions to poll coverage. Voters saw greater hostile poll bias in out-group media than in in-group media. Consequences of such perceived hostility, however, appeared inconsistent and mixed.