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Unintended Information Exposure and Political Knowledge in Spain

Citizenship
Media
Political Psychology
Knowledge
Broadcast
Internet
Carolina Galais
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Carolina Galais
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Abstract

There is an inconclusive debate at the core of the studies on political knowledge about the actual effect of media exposure. While newspapers reading is positively related to knowledge (Scheufele & Nisbet 2002) television only will boost political knowledge when it comes to broadcasted news (Newton 1999). As the use of digital media and cable tv widespread increasing the choice that individuals have, it seems that their preferred choice between News or Entertainment will determine whether or not media exposure will improve political knowledge (Prior 2005). Yet internet has a mostly unexplored potential for unintended political information exposure (i.e. through social media) that none of the offline media has (Tewksbury et al 2001). Is digital media use able to reduce the political knowledge gap between the previously interested and educated, all other media use kept equal ? Disentangling the relationship between media consumption and knowledge requires the appropriate data in order to get rid of the endogeneity problem, but although some scholars have made use of panel data (de Vreese and Boomgaarden 2006) this is not the general strategy, as repeated measures of knowledge can cause respondents to learn and, tus, to overestimate change. This study asumes the challenge to tap the dynamics of political knowledge of a Spanish young internet users over a year and a half time span. We come up with a measure of political knowledge and we track its change in a four-wave panel survey. Next, we analyse the effects of media exposure and political information consumption from newspapers –both offline and online-, radio and television –differentiating between public news exposure and commercial news exposure- and the Internet more broadly.