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The triangle of polarization, political trust and political communication: understanding its dynamics in contemporary democracies (TRI-POL) /
EXPERIMENT - TRI-POL, Wave 1
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Description: Experiment embedded in the first wave of the TRI-POL project. The purpose of this experiment was to test the effect of exposure to different Twitter accounts on a set of relevant political attitudes, such as political interest, affective and ideological polarization and political trust. Participation was restricted via invitation. Specifically, respondents were invited to follow one or two Twitter accounts from a list provided to them during the next seven days. Two experimental groups were created with a different list of Twitter accounts. Assignment to the first list, containing the political leaders’ accounts of the main parties, or the second one, with a list of institutional accounts, was randomized by a computer algorithm. After seven days, respondents who participated in the experiment were re-contacted, answered some question about their exposure to and the content of the selected Twitter accounts, and completed the survey questionnaire about their political attitudes and opinions. To verify respondents’ activity in Twitter, information is collected with a passive behavioural metre. The prefix 'esmP' indicates experimental variables.