Stuart Soroka

Stuart Soroka is a professor in the departments of communication and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on political communication, political psychology, and the relationships between public policy, public opinion, and mass media. He has been particularly interested in negativity (and positivity) in news coverage and the role of mass media in fostering informed citizens and effective representative democracy. Soroka’s work includes Information and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), The Increasing Viability of Good News (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Negativity in Democratic Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Degrees of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was recently awarded the 2025 Book Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

Soroka’s project, “Political Polarization and the News Media Ecosystem,” will consider the ways in which changing media technologies and market pressures produce polarizing news content. Using computational methods, his research will examine the contents and nature of news on both legacy and new media platforms over decades, identifying ways in which platform design and audience-making can be adjusted to reduce the proliferation of polarizing news content.

May 2026