Generational Gaps in Political Media Use and Civic Engagement

From Baby Boomers to Generation Z

Kim Andersen, Jakob Ohme, Camilla Bjarnøe, Mats Joe Bordacconi, Erik Albæk, Claes H De Vreese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367629328
• eBook ISBN: 9781000285017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book investigates news use patterns among five different generations in a time where digital media create a multi-choice media environment.

The book introduces the EPIG Model (Engagement-Participation-Information-Generation) to study how different generational cohorts' exposure to political information is related to their political engagement and participation. The authors build on a multi-method framework to determine direct and indirect media effects across generations. The unique dataset allows for comparison of effects between legacy and social media use and helps to disentangle the influence on citizens' political involvement in nonelection as well as during political campaign times. Bringing the newly of-age Generation Z into the picture, the book presents an in-depth understanding of how a changing media environment presents different challenges and opportunities for political involvement of this, as well as older generations.

Bringing the conversation around political engagement and the media up to date for the new generation, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the areas of media studies, communication studies, technology, political science and political communication.

1
Times are changing

Saturday morning at a family breakfast table: as the eating winds down, father Peter picks up the printed broadsheet newspaper. The family have been subscribers to the same morning newspaper for years, the same paper that Peter’s and mother Sarah’s parents read when Peter and Sarah were kids. An independent business owner, Sarah quickly skims through the paper’s business section on her tablet, using the newspaper’s app, then checks her fitness app and departs for a yoga class. Their three children each have their smartphones out. The youngest, age 11, is picking up a game that was paused when breakfast started. The middle child, 13, is in a lengthy Snapchat session. The oldest, 17, is scrolling through a long stream of Instagram posts. Before taking off for field hockey, in response to an Instagram post, she comments on how much water is needed to produce a kilo of meat.

The scene is a snapshot of the rapidly changing information ecology. The way in which—and the degree to which—citizens in today’s democracies consume and expose themselves to political information is fundamentally different from how things were only a couple of decades ago. Younger generations grow up in a high-choice environment that would have been inconceivable to their parents. Parents in their 40s today were children of black and white television, landline telephones, nightly television news programmes, free print newspapers, and—in their late youth—the arrival of the internet and its initial affordances. They are typically avid users of Face-book. Their teenage children, born after 2000, however, have grown up in the mobile and visual age: cell phones, smartphones, tablets, media hybridity, and social media platforms. Social media to them means WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat.

The generations each have their own set of opportunities to inform themselves. At the same time, each cycle of life comes with a different set of opportunities. Parents of today grew up in newspaper households. Typically, they engaged less with newspapers during the adolescent years before becoming newspaper users themselves, albeit at a much lower level than their own parents. These ‘media life histories’ illustrate the fundamental change in the information ecology. The supply of political information has never been bigger, the time spent with media has never been longer, and at the same time, it has never been easier to avoid political information while still being connected.

The changing media landscape has offered a new opportunity structure for citizens; as the media landscape has changed, so has the opportunity for citizens to engage and express themselves and to participate politically. Political involvement is of key importance in a well-functioning democracy, and in this book, we argue that news media use is vital to understand how people are involved politically. The changing environment for media use and political participation, with the changing opportunity structures that follow, needs to be unpacked. How do these changes affect the way that citizens engage in society and politics? We approach this key question from a generational perspective: what are the consumption, engagement, and participation patterns across different generations? And is the impact of exposure to political information different for citizens in different cycles of life? In this chapter we first unpack the changing media landscape and the new opportunities for political involvement. We then focus specifically on the generational perspective in understanding the relationship between media use and political involvement. Finally, we outline the structure of the book’s remaining chapters.

Understanding political information consumption in today’s communication ecology

The supply side of political information has changed. Research spanning decades shows that the supply of news has increased in traditional media like television (see Esser et al., 2012) and newspapers, with more free newspapers entering the market (e.g., Bakker, 2008). At the same time, the online presence of traditional news organizations has burgeoned, and new information brokers have become popular. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are now central to the news ecology, and personal messaging services like WhatsApp are also increasingly important for understanding the political information landscape. In addition, traditional genre-determined boundaries have shifted, resulting in a wider mix of different types of content, often combining harder, factual news with softer entertainment features. As a consequence, citizens can easily create their own personal media diets with varying degrees of political information based on individual preferences (Arceneaux & Johnson, 2013; Prior, 2007).

The demand side has also changed. Subscriptions to newspapers have been decreasing for years. Some groups have become political news junkies, while sizeable parts of the electorate are opting out of news consumption (Bos, Kruikemeier, & de Vreese, 2016). Yet others have migrated towards relatively brief news encounters, almost ‘news snacking,’ thanks to generators and social media sites. These changes in the demand side vary significantly across generations, with younger news consumers, for example, consuming most of their news online only (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Nielsen, 2018).

These developments in the media landscape, on both the supply and the demand sides, are not linear or uniform across generations. They represent a general development in the past two decades, but recent data show additional nuances and even, in some cases, reversals. The 2018 Reuters report (Newman et al., 2018) notes that the use of social media is falling for the first time in years, whereas the use of messaging apps (like WhatsApp) is increasing. This change might suggest a migration from more public platforms to more private platforms when it comes to political information, but it is still too soon to tell. Another example is the increasing number of digital newspaper subscriptions in the past couple of years. This increase breaks the curve of virtually across-the-board decline. Again, however, it is too early to determine whether this reversal is temporary and what it looks like across countries. Likewise, we do not know if this development has been brought about by traditional news consumers—who in the past tuned out of paying for news but have now returned—or by new and younger news consumers. Whether we look at long-term trends or some of the more recent fluctuations, in all cases we see differences between generations.

Underlying some of these user data are more structural transformations in the news ecology, being part of larger changes in political communication altogether (see Van Aelst et al., 2017). These changes do not apply only to supply and demand but also to discussions about the quality and trustworthiness of news; the value of information and the ongoing misinformation crisis; the increasing concentration of media ownership; increasing audience fragmentation and polarization of political attitudes; increasing relativism and questioning of authority, truth, and authenticity; and the increasing inequality in political knowledge between news users and non-users. Such tendencies also capture the concerns of misinformation and limited media literacy in today’s media landscape. These larger changes form the backdrop against which we study political information exposure and address the questions of whether consumption patterns are different across generations and whether different generations are affected differently by political information.

Changing political involvement?

‘More than 15,000 litres of water for a kilo of beef?’ The family looks up from their newspapers and smartphones when the 11-year-old expresses surprise about the number that the older sibling has just picked up on an Instagram post. A friend shared this post, in which an NGO calls for signing a petition against factory farming. The 13-year-old responds with rolling eyes and feels supported in her decision to boycott meat for the past three years. ‘We should eat less meat,’ one of their parents mumbles. ‘That would still not change the conditions in which most animals are held,’ the oldest child responds. ‘Such factories will change only if we stand right in front of their doors and demonstrate for the rights of animals.’ The other parent now joins the debate: ‘These farmers are only doing their job within the framework that politics gives them. If you really want to change something, you should join a party that aims at changing the relevant legislation.’

As citizens’ opportunity structure—in terms of both political information supply and demand—has changed so too have patterns of political participation. Citizen participation in political processes is at the core of all conceptions of liberal democracies (Strömbäck, 2005). Central scholars like Schumpeter (1942) and Schattschneider (1975) all emphasize the importance of citizen participation. They diverge, however, in their conception of how much and what type of participation is needed in a healthy democracy.

Competitive democracy is seen as a means to aggregate voters’ individual preferences when competing elites supply policy packages on the political market and voters buy their preferred package with their votes (Held, 1987). This model of representative democracy presupposes multiple elites that, through competition, keep each other at bay. Citizens’ political participation is linked to turnout at elections but is neither needed nor desirable between elections—for instance, during the formulation of party policies. The normative role of the mass media in a competitive democracy is to provide information to citizens on central political and social challenges, on how political parties have performed since the last election, and on what their policy packages consist of in order that citizens can make informed vote choices (Strömbäck, 2005).

At the other end of the scale, so to speak, participatory democracy considers citizens’ active participation not only a means to obtain authoritative decisions for society but also a goal in itself: besides influencing political decisions, popular participation has an educational function in that it teaches citizens how to take part in public debate, how to form opinions on societal problems, and how to solve conflicts on mutual matters, thus turning them into politically competent citizens. These arguments are used, among others, by Alexis de Tocqueville (Sharpe, 1970, p. 161) and John Stuart Mill (1912) in defence of local government, which gives citizens a chance to learn the skills necessary to run a well-functioning democracy. Participatory democracy does not imply that free elections are obsolete but rather that citizens must constantly act out democracy. Just think of recent examples like the Fridays of Future, Black Lives Matter, or #MeToo movements, where protest participation is changing not only the public debate but also current legislation in many countries. What happens between elections thus becomes of utmost importance for the well-being of democracy (Held, 1987). Equally important, in a well-functioning democracy, all parts of the citizenry participate politically—not only the elderly but also the youth. Just as in a competitive democracy, the media in a participatory democracy are normatively obliged to provide political information to citizens in a manner that enables them to make informed choices. In addition, the media are also obliged to encourage the greatest possible participation by citizens not only in public debate but also in democratic decision-making in all its forms (Strömbäck, 2005).

The normative literature diverges both on how much citizens are to participate in a healthy democracy and on how they are to participate. Some argue that deliberation is key to democracy and therefore put a premium on collectivistic activities with some element of deliberation—for instance, membership of a political party or participation in election meetings or demonstrations. However, in recent decades, many new forms of more individualistic political activities without active deliberation have emerged, for instance, signing of online petitions, crowdfunding, or boycotting of products. Both collectivistic and individualistic forms of participation create a political ‘we’ that is intended to influence authoritative decisions—the former, primarily through deliberation (a collectivistic ‘we’), the latter, primarily through aggregation of interests (an individualistic ‘we’). In sum, assessing the amount and type of political participation in healthy democracies and whether the media performs its democratic role satisfactorily depends on the normative democratic standards applied.

Generally speaking, the empirical study of political participation is of continuous importance since it is an indicator of the quality of democracy (Theocharis & van Deth, 2016). As opportunity structures in the media landscape change, so do opportunity structures for political participation. The ways in which citizens can express opinions, show political engagement, and participate in decision-making processes are constantly evolving. In the past 20 years, opportunity structures have changed rapidly. New participatory activities—such as supporting crowdfunding campaigns or signing online petitions—are now part of the mainstream participation repertoire. Indeed, some of the most important new ways of participation are digital (Theocharis, 2015).

Our aim in this book is to offer a new perspective, in the broadest sense, on the relationship between exposure to political information in the media and political involvement, with a specific focus on generational differences. Our task implies a further reflection on the conceptualization and ultimately the measurement of political participation. We supply definitions in more detail in Chapter 2, but suffice it to say for now that we intend the concept of political participation to be inclusive and to reflect digitally networked or other more recent forms of participation. Since voting turnout is remarkably high and stable in Denmark, the case country of this book, we have chosen to focus on other types of political participation for which the opportunity structures of participation have changed, both in non-election times and in times of election campaigns. Again, our core interest will be how these different types of participation relate to political information exposure in the media, most importantly, whether these aspects are different between generations and whether specific generations are more susceptible to media effects than others.

Why the youth

Scholars often argue that the world is changing—and not for the better. One particular group of citizens, the youth, has caught a noticeable amount of scholarly attention. On the one hand, some scholars—often focusing exclusively on traditional participation opportunities such as voting behaviour—paint a pessimistic picture of the future and of the young generatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1 Times are changing
• 2 The EPIG model—political information exposure and political involvement in a generational perspective
• 3 A multi-methods research design
• 4 Being exposed to political information in the media
• 5 Getting interested in, learning about, and feeling capable of participating in politics
• 6 Participation targeting the political system
• 7 Participation targeting the local community
• 8 Being politically motivated
• 9 Social media, political engagement, and participation
• 10 Election times: special times?
• 11 Are the kids alright?
• Appendix
• References
• Index