News Media Consumption and the Democratic Behavior of Individuals in Latin America

Attempts to understand how news media consumption impacts individuals have proliferated in recent decades. Lacking from this body of research are efforts to understand how news media consumption affects people generally across non-developed regions. This project looks to add to our understanding of media effects by shifting the population of interest to include individuals in Latin America. Recognizing that consuming news media has a socializing effect lodged in promoting powerful symbols in news coverage, survey data collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project are employed to search for evidence of changes in political behavior given varying levels of news media consumption. The results of the statistical analysis support two conclusions. (1) There is evidence that Latin Americans who consume news media have a higher probability of political participation relative to individuals who consume no news media. (2) The influence of news media consumption on political behavior may be better understood when an intervening variable, political interest, is included.