Political Identity and News Choice: analyzing the shifting logic of selective exposure during Catalan independence

Political communication scholars have overwhelmingly explored selective exposure to the news media so far by focusing on the left-right cleavage, overlooking how other sources of political identity might guide news media consumption, partly as a result of the US dominance of the discipline. But political conflict significantly varies across countries, and evidence from the American context cannot be easily generalized to Europe, especially to Southern Europe. We address this gap by exploring how political attitudes and cultural traits on the national divide influence Catalans’ news media choices for three news media types (television, radio, and newspapers) over a seven-year period (2010-2017), which encompasses the development of the Catalan independence conflict, including four regional elections, the celebration of an illegal referendum and the suppression of Catalan autonomy through the application of the article 155 of the Spanish Constitution. For doing so, we use four post-electoral surveys conducted by the Spanish Center of Sociological Research (CIS) after the last four regional elections celebrated in Catalonia (2010, 2012, 2015 and 2017). Binomial logistic regressions indicate that independence support and national identity are significant predictors of Catalans’ news media choices over time, so that Catalans who support independence and feel only Catalan have a greater preference for regional/local news media outlets, while Catalans against independence who feel only Spanish are far more likely to prefer national news media outlets, controlling for place of birth, language, position in the left-right cleavage, age, sex, education and social class. More interestingly, our findings show that independence support becomes increasingly relevant as a driver of news media choice during the course of the independence conflict (2010-2017), especially for radio and television choices, probably reflecting the process of political polarization on Catalan independence growing during the same period. These results indicate that selective exposure to the news media is highly context-sensitive, and that the political background significantly influences individual news consumption decisions. A complementary sensitivity analysis –replicating all regression models through an alternative proxy of independence support- confirms this result. We discuss the implications for democracy of such audience segregation, highlight how opportunity structures remain critical for understanding selective exposure across media environments, and underscore how predictors of news media exposure shift in importance depending on the political environment.