This investigation explored whether there was a relationship between comfort in discussing political views and faculty members' political party preferences. The questions of whether political comfort differed based on gender, religious affiliation, academic discipline, and/or institutional affiliation were also explored. Both economics and political science faculty did not report comfort in discussing political views in the context of departmental committee service. Economics faculty either did not report on their colleagues' political views or they disagreed with their colleagues' political views. Political science faculty either did not report on their colleagues' political views or they agreed with their colleagues' political views. Also, this investigation found minimal ethnic and political diversity among the respondents.

This study was conducted to identify the nature of the content devoted to the 2008 presidential election in the editorial pages of three newspapers. The research sought to discover what percentage of the content was specific to the election, whether this election-centered content focused on the campaign or on specific issues, what issues were covered, and the role in which the author was writing. This study used a comparative quantitative content analysis to examine this content appearing during the final three months of the 2008 campaign in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle, three major U.S. metropolitan newspapers with regional focus. The results provided insight into whether a marketplace of ideas exists in the editorial pages of the selected newspapers. Analysis of the election-related material revealed that each newspaper devoted a substantial portion of their editorial pages to the election. However, of that election-centered material, the majority was focused on the campaign, or "horse race," devoting much less to the discussion of substantive policy issues. The exception was the San Francisco Chronicle, which devoted almost 50% of its election-centered material to substantive issues. Only a handful of issues dominated the issue coverage in each newspaper: money, social issues, and defense/foreign policy. The general format for the editorial pages in each newspaper allowed for only a limited amount of diversity with the role in which an author is writing (i.e. the newspaper's own editorial writers vs. letters to the editor written by citizens). The majority of columns, the portion of the editorial pages where a diversity of authors has the potential to exist, were made up by authors identified by only a handful of roles.

Private sector knowledge producers, more commonly known as think tanks or research institutes, are used as authoritative sources in Western media either as interview guests or their research quoted by journalists.  Most studies have focused on their ability to influence government policy, but very little has focused on their role in the public sphere, particularly their visibility in media.  This study will explore how often think representatives appear as authoritative sources or experts in broadcast media during the 2015, 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections.  This will be done through a quantitative content analysis and thematic analysis investigating whether such representatives are accorded preferential access and ascribed primary authority to define narratives.  Additionally, a theoretical model has been designed to detect whether a marketplace of ideas can be detected or whether television news is a site of Habermassian rational-critical public sphere.  Inspired by the work of Anstead and Chadwick, and taking this vital work further, this study investigates whether authority signalling, and primary definition is still a relevant theory by analysing broadcast news coverage across three general elections.