A scholar of political socialization, Prof. McDevitt explores influences of family, media, and schools in the cultivation of youth civic development and ideological identity. This research highlights the value of conflict seeking and deliberation in youth expression, rather than adopting the prevailing view of political development as internalization and conflict avoidance. He is currently writing about adolescent attraction to authoritarian ideologies. In a second area of political communication, Prof. McDevitt studies how journalism operates as a political institution during democratic backsliding. He was recently editor of a special issue of Mass Communication and Society: Media and the Future of Democracy. He is the author of Where Ideas Go to Die: The Fate of Intellect in American Journalism (Oxford, 2020). The book documents how anti-intellectualism is encoded in routine news and channeled in more spectacular cases of media ritual. Chapters draw evidence from a national survey of journalism students, interviews of 'dangerous professors' targeted by vigilante groups, and case studies that document journalistic complicity in the rise of authoritarian populism.
keywords
political communication, political socialization, youth civic engagement, political identity, journalism studies, media sociology, anti-intellectualism, populism, deliberation, authoritarianism
