Is the New Media Reshaping the Relationship Between Partisanship and Political Knowledge? Some Evidence from the Spanish Case

This paper asks and wants to know whether changes in the media environment, especially, through the influence of the New Media, are affecting -- and how – the relationship between political knowledge and partisanship. There are competing hypothesis concerning how changes in the social and media environments are affecting this relation. On the one hand, Dalton (1984, 2007) has argued that higher levels of education and greater influence of the mass media are weakening the relationship between political knowledge and partisanship. According to this author, due to these socio-economic changes, higher levels of political knowledge are now associated with lower levels of partisanship. On the other hand, Prior (2007) has found that the shift from a low choice to a high-choice media environment has led to a strengthening of this relation in the United States. This paper wants to put to the test these competing hypotheses for the case of Spain. In particular, this paper aims to test the following interactive hypothesis: different types of media environments (or different types of media, traditional and new) are expected to shape the relationship between political knowledge and partisanship in different ways. To start exploring this relationship for the case of Spain this paper will use survey data from the Spanish Centre of Sociological Research. First, it will use data at the aggregate level to analyze the evolution of these variables (political knowledge and partisanship) throughout time and media environments; second, it will select specific surveys to test the relationships at the individual level.