A large and increasing share of media consumption in the United States takes place on podcasts. However, two of the most theoretically interesting features of this development also make it difficult to study empirically: the boundary between political and non-political shows is porous, and the audience is highly fragmented in ways that frustrate standard survey research. We address these challenges by first inferring political discussion frequency, relative left/right orientation, and network cluster in a sample of roughly 7,000 shows that are either categorized as political or share at least one guest with a show categorized as political. We then demonstrate how these show-level metadata can be incorporated into survey research to dramatically broaden and deepen our understanding of the political information consumption in this developing ecosystem.
- Psychology and Neuroscience