How does selective exposure affect partisan polarisation? Media consumption on electoral campaigns

ABSTRACT

Internationally-recognized studies have identified the effects of selective exposure to the media and its implications for the proper functioning of democratic systems. The theory of cognitive dissonance, by which citizens decide to expose to like-minded contents and reject inconsistent ones with their ideology or values, allows us in this article to test their possible effects on voting and increasingly partisan polarisation in west European political systems. To carry out it, through a sample of 5943 citizens (from the post-electoral survey of the 2019 General Elections of the Spanish national centre for sociological analysis), we have analysed how exposure to media affects vote choice, party affiliation and reject other parties. Through statistical analysis models, results demonstrate media consumption effects on partisan polarisation in electoral campaigns, especially in populist parties. Accordingly, this article provides empirical evidence that ideological affiliation to this kind of parties is highly influenced by a restrictive media diet (exposure to a very limited number of media, even a just one) with high-polarised content.

KEYWORDS:

• Selective exposure
• vote
• polarisation
• partisanship
• populism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data offered by post-electoral surveys of the Center for Sociological Research for 2011 (n° 2920), 2015 (n° 3126), 2016 (n° 3145) y 2019 (N° 3248) General Elections.

2 Question 14, post-electoral surveys of the Center for Sociological Research for April 2019 General Elections (n° 3248).

3 Given the fragmentation of the Spanish party system (regional and/or peripheral parties), we have tested the different analysis groups (voters) separately by binary logistic regressions versus multinomial models. We assume that this model may be less systematic, but more focused conceptually, given that it is not an individual-level voting study, but rather an investigation of the effects of exposure to media on their decision-making process and political polarisation.

4 Question 36: Could you tell me if you feel close to or close to any party or political coalition?

5 Question n° 40: what is the probability that you will vote for each of the parties that I am going to mention, using a scale from 0 to 10, knowing that 0 means that ‘surely, I would never vote’ and the 10 ‘in all certainty, I would always vote for it’.

6 Spanish Ministry of the Interior Data.

7 According to the General Media Survey (EGM), in its different analysis waves for 2019, the EsRadio network has increased audiences by 24.2% compared to the previous year, with the morning programme of the anchor Federico Jiménez-Los Santos, who obtains the best audience data, doubling its radio listeners from 2016 to 2019, surpassing half a million.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

José María Ramírez-Dueñas

José María Ramírez-Dueñas, Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Applied Sociology (Political Communication and Voting Behaviour), Complutense University of Madrid. His published researches are mainly focused on the study of Public Opinion and Electoral Campaigns: political and media polarisation, electoral campaigns and voting- decision processes, effects of polls on public opinion or analysis in multi-level elections in Spain.

María Lourdes Vinuesa-Tejero

María Lourdes Vinuesa-Tejero, Coordinator of the Advanced Studies Postgraduate Course in Political Communication and Full Professor of Public Opinion and Political Effects of the Media in the Department of Applied Sociology of the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid.