Media Usage and Negative Voting

In this chapter, we explore the relationship between exposure to political information in old and new media, and negative voting in the five elections analyzed. The results suggest that consumers of political information on newspapers and television generally tend to vote for, rather than against. Contrary to our original expectation, negative voters do not seem to be avid political news’ consumers whose attitudes are largely contaminated by the degree of negativity in political communication. Across most countries, the results generally challenge our assumption that a higher exposure to political content on the news media is conductive to negative voting. Congruent with this pattern of political disengagement, negative voters seem to consume less political information than positive voters, be it on television, newspapers, or social media platforms.