Potential PVV voters ended up voting for another party in the previous elections after watching the #HoeDan broadcast of ‘Zondag met Lubach’. This was shown in research by Mark Boukes. He also discovered that political satire programmes on TV attract viewers who do not follow political news on traditional media. Indeed, satire has a strong potential to get people, especially young people, involved in politics. ‘That’s why I’m hoping “Zondag met Lubach” will start again this weekend so close to the elections. It would give many young citizens (and voters) the opportunity to better prepare themselves for this crucial democratic event that will take place in a few weeks’ time,’ the researcher says.

Mark Boukes, Xiaotong Chu, M. F. Abdulqadir Noon, Rufei Liu, Theo Araujo & Anne C. Kroon (2021) Comparing user-content interactivity and audience diversity across news and satire: differences in online engagement between satire, regular news and partisan news, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2021.1927928

Image credits

Icon image: lubach - wikimedia commons

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