Media Use and Political Engagement in Three New Democracies

Abstract

Political communications literature has long been concerned with the question of whether media exposure results in symptoms of “malaise”—disaffection and withdrawal from politics—or, alternatively, whether it can mobilize people for political activity. Thus far, the results of research into this question have been inconclusive and at times contradictory in nature. However, nearly all such studies have been conducted in the context of the United States or other advanced democracies, and in these countries media use competes with a variety of other—perhaps much stronger—factors influencing political engagement, such as well-developed partisanship, strong group loyalties, lifelong personal experiences with the political system, and so forth. We chose to investigate the “malaise versus mobilization” question in the context of three new democracies—the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland—where the above-mentioned factors have not yet had a chance to mature, and where media use could potentially have an especially strong impact on attitudes and behavior. The project utilizes a series of comparable questions on national random-sample surveys carried out in each country during the parliamentary election campaigns of 2005 and 2006 to map party supporters and media audiences, and assess questions about malaise versus mobilization. Our maps of party supporters and media audiences show that TV news and tabloids reach larger and more diverse audiences than broadsheets and some niche broadcasting channels. In all three countries, while there were no significant relationships between media use and trust in government, there was some evidence to support the mobilization hypothesis: the use of broadsheets and politically opinionated weekly news magazines had a strong positive relationship with political engagement that remained when controlling for political interest and a number of sociodemographic characteristics. Our research suggests that the malaise versus mobilization debate continues to be an important basis for studying these more recent democracies.