Communication research underlines two types of selective exposure to the media: one guided by ideological-partisan affiliations and one guided by interest in politics. This work will compare both motivations in the consumption of political information through three media types (digital press, television, and radio) by Spanish citizens during the 2019 November General Election. Through multinomial logistic regressions applied to a representative post-electoral survey, results show that ideological-partisan orientations are the most important variables governing selective exposure, especially for the digital press and the radio. Besides confirming ideological selective exposure, the data highlight an important tendency towards selective avoidance of news media perceived as ideologically incongruent. For television, however, both socio-demographic trends and ideological orientations exhibit a similar explanatory weight, which suggests that political segmentation of the Spanish television market is still being deployed by communication groups, in comparison with the press and the radio.
TopIntroduction
The perspective of selective exposure states that media consumption is determined by the preferences of the audience, which seeks to confirm or reinforce their opinions through media content. This idea-axis, which appeared in the early 1940s in communication research (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944), has been recovered in recent decades (Mutz, 2006; Bennett & Iyengar, 2008; Iyengar & Hahn, 2009; Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015) to explain the consumption of media messages by audiences in a media context characterized by a greater capacity for selection (Prior, 2007), by the growth of the Internet and social networks as a source of information (Van Aelst et al., 2017) and by customizing the information search (Valentino et al., 2009; Dylko et al., 2017).
In Spain, several studies have shown that the consumption of political information conforms to the argument of selective exposure oriented by ideological and political predispositions (Martín Llaguno & Berganza, 2001; Humanes, 2014, 2016), in accordance with the characteristics of the system of pluralist-polarized media (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). However, these previous works have not taken into account other variables - such as political interest - that can also explain selective exposure to political information (Skovsgaard et al., 2016).
Along these lines, the main objective of this chapter is to explore what factors explain selective exposure to political information in Spain, considering two types of variables: those related to selective exposure oriented by ideological and partisan predispositions, and those that are associated with selective exposure oriented by political interest. In addition, it is analyzed whether the explanatory potential of these two types of indicators varies across different types of media (digital newspapers, television channels and radio channels). To do this, the chapter relies on data from the post-election survey of the Spanish Sociological Research Center (CIS) on the general elections of November 10, 2019 in Spain, which includes several questions related to the consumption of political information during the electoral campaign.