ABSTRACT

While previous studies have examined the effect of news consumption on voting, the possible differential relationships between news consumption (local and national), news media preference (traditional and digital), and local and national voting have not been extensively examined. This study explores the role of news media consumption (local/national and traditional/digital) as predictors in voting in local and national elections, using a nationally representative data set from the Pew Research Center collected in 2016. Even though both types of news consumption are positive predictors of voting at both levels, local news consumption is more relevant when predicting local voting, and national news consumption when predicting national voting respectively. Moreover, the results indicate that traditional media are still a significant positive predictor of local voting while digital media are not. Neither traditional nor digital media platforms play a significant role in predicting national voting. The overall effect of news consumption on voting is more complicated and nuanced than hitherto discussed in the literature.

摘要

虽然之前的研究已经检验了新闻消费对投票的影响，但新闻消费（地方和国家）、新闻媒体偏好（传统和数字）以及地方和国家投票之间可能存在的差异关系尚未得到广泛研究。本研究使用皮尤研究中心 2016 年收集的具有全国代表性的数据集，探讨了新闻媒体消费（地方/国家和传统/数字）作为地方和国家选举投票预测因素的作用。尽管这两种类型的新闻消费是两个级别的投票的正预测因子，本地新闻消费在预测本地投票时更相关，而国家新闻消费在预测全国投票时更相关。而且，结果表明，传统媒体仍然是当地投票的重要积极预测因素，而数字媒体则不是。传统媒体平台和数字媒体平台在预测全国投票方面都没有发挥重要作用。新闻消费对投票的总体影响比迄今为止文献中讨论的更为复杂和微妙。