MARKUS PRIOR

Associate Professor of Politics and Public Affairs
Co-Director, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP)
Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Politics
Princeton University

313 Robertson Hall Woodrow Wilson School Princeton University 609.258.2749 (tel) 609.258.5014 (fax) mprior@princeton.edu CV (PDF)	Markus Prior is Associate Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Prior won the 2008 Emerging Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association's Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford’s Department of Communication in 2004. He is the author of Post-Broadcast Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which won the 2009 Goldsmith Book Prize, awarded by Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center, and the 2010 Doris Graber Award for the "best book on political communication in the last 10 years" given by APSA's Political Communication Section. The book examines how broadcast television, cable television, and the Internet have changed politics in the United States over the last half-century. Prior's work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Public Opinion Quarterly.	BUY Cambridge University Press Amazon.com
	BOOK
	Prior, Markus. (2007). Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge University Press. Seventy years ago, commercial television did not exist. Print media were the most widely available source for news. Thirty-five years ago, television was universally available, but people had only few channels to choose from. Today, the average viewer has a choice between a hundred channels, including several 24-hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on i-pods and online. The purpose of his book is to examine systematically how these differences affect political behavior. Using experiments and new survey data, it shows how changes in the media environment reverberate through the political system, affecting news exposure, political learning, turnout, and voting behavior. Before television, news was difficult. Only television, by virtue of being both easy to follow and hard to resist, drew the less educated into the news audience. In the 1970s and ‘80s, more people watched television news than at any other time, but only because they had little choice. Today, cable television and the Internet offer people a lot more choice. Some people have seen the last newscast of their lives. To news junkies, politics has become a candy store. Political involvement becomes more unequal and elections more polarized.
	CURRENT PROJECTS
	Stability and Development of Political Interest Some people are more interested in politics than others. Yet why this is so remains largely unclear, because political scientists have devoted little attention to studying political interest as a dependent variable. Understanding where political interest comes from and how it changes is significant because interest has strong effects on many other political cognitions and behaviors, and because these effects appear to be growing. Visual Political Knowledge This ongoing project examines the measurement and impact of visual political knowledge. Its goal is to determine if the inclusion of visual elements in knowledge questions improves the validity of the measure and changes our conclusions about the public’s knowledge of politics. Even though visual images and television are ubiquitous in American politics, survey researchers have never examined if people remember these visuals and use this knowledge in their reasoning. A recently completed second survey to replicate and expand the initial findings is currently being analyzed. Partisan Bias in Perception of Economic Conditions This project evaluates two different explanations for partisan differences in response to factual questions about economic and political conditions: Most existing work on bias assumes that partisans not know any better when they report their beliefs about these facts. But an alternative hypothesis exists: Partisans give the wrong answer even though they have more accurate information. They may disregard this information and instead give an answer that is more consistent with their partisan predispositions. Data from a second set of survey experiments is currently being analyzed.
	SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
	Prior, Markus (2013). Media and Political Polarization. Annual Review of Political Science, 16. pdf Prior, Markus (forthcoming). Conditions for Political Accountability in a High-Choice Media Environment. In: Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, Oxford University Press. pdf Prior, Markus (2012). Who Watches Presidential Debates? Measurement Problems in Campaign Effects Research. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76 (2): 350-363. pdf Prior, Markus (2010). You've Either Got It or You Don’t? The Stability of Political Interest over the Life Cycle. Journal of Politics, 72 (3): 747-766. pdf appendix Prior, Markus (2009). Improving Media Effects Research through Better Measurement of News Exposure. Journal of Politics, 71 (3): 893-908. pdf Prior, Markus (2009). The Immensely Inflated News Audience: Assessing Bias in Self-Reported News Exposure. Public Opinion Quarterly, 73 (1): 130-143. pdf Prior, Markus and Arthur Lupia (2008). Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills. American Journal of Political Science, 52 (1): 168-182. pdf Prior, Markus (2006). The Incumbent in the Living Room: The Rise of Television and the Incumbency Advantage in U.S. House Elections. Journal of Politics, 68 (3): 657-673. pdf Prior, Markus (2005). News v. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout. American Journal of Political Science, 49 (3): 594-609. pdf Prior, Markus (2003). Any Good News in Soft News? The Impact of Soft News Preference on Political Knowledge. Political Communication, 20 (2): 149-171. pdf