New Political Opinion Leaders: Applying Previously Established News Repertoires to a Liberal Arts College and the American Public

In this paper, I first replicate a study completed by Frank Mangold and Marko Bachl (2018) to see if their results regarding political opinion leadership and news repertoires in Germany correspond to similar findings at Carleton College in Minnesota. Assessing data from a small-n survey (n=173) that was sent out to the student body, I found that an “omnivore repertoire” media approach was more influential regarding political opinion leadership than other repertoire categories. However, my results were not statistically significant, which may indicate that my subset of Carleton College does not accurately mirror the news use demonstrated in the German population. I then further expanded the study, using the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey results from 2016. My findings from this large-n survey (n=1297) indicated that my original “omnivore” findings proved robust when examining the American population in general. Omnivore consumers were more positively correlated to being political opinion leaders than their counterparts in other repertoires. The findings from my secondary study proved to be statistically significant. These findings indicate that as media fragmentation occurs, consumers who adjust their media consumption to accept a wide variety of sources are more inclined to be political opinion leaders