Citizens' local political knowledge and the role of media access

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 86, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 809-826

  Shaker, Lee ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MASS MEDIA; MEDIA ROLE; NATIONAL POLITICS; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; PUBLIC ACCESS; TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE;

EID: 77950506622     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900908600406     Document Type: Article

References (61)

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6. The "local political information" that this article refers to is information about a community's characteristics, its salient issues, and the practice of local politics. As such, it differs from national, or general, political information not in provenance but in topic. In other words, it is information about local politics, not information provided by local sources about politics in general.
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15. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters.
16. Delli Carpini and Keeter included some basic media variables as well, finding that general newspaper use-but not radio or TV usewas significantly correlated with local political knowledge.
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51. The sample drawn for this study reflects the city of Philadelphia's population, though levels of education and income appear to be slightly high. For an overview of the city's demographics, visit http:/ /quick facts.census.gov/qfd/states/42/42101.html.
52. In line with other survey research, 17% of respondents either did not know their annual household income or refused to answer the question. After a single-item imputation was used, an income response was available for 96% of respondents. An income for respondents that did not volunteer one was tabulated by substituting the mean income level of other respondents in the same zip code who did provide an income. Four percent of survey respondents provided neither an income nor a zip code and, consequently, are dropped from the multivariate analyses.
53. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters.
54. National and local political interest are included in both regression models presented in this paper for two reasons. First, including both makes the two models identical aside from the dependent variables. This allows for clearer comparison. Second, including both interest measures is a way to check the construct validity of the dependent variable knowledge indices. Theoretically, local political interest should predict local political knowledge but not national political knowledge. Similarly, national political interest should predict national political knowledge but not local political knowledge. In the models presented in this paper, this is the case and some modicum of inferential confidence can be derived from this fact.
55. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters.
56. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters.
57. Moy et al., "Political Correlates of Local News Media Use."
58. McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy, "Community, Communication, and Participation: The Role of Mass Media and Interpersonal Discussion in Local Political Participation."
59. Hutchings, "Political Context, Issue Salience, and Selective Attentiveness: Constituent Knowledge of the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Vote."
60. Project for Excellence in Journalism, "The State of the News Media 2008."
61. There is a strong positive correlation between Internet access and income (R = .40, p ≤ 01) and education (R = .37, p ≤ .01). Income and education, as depicted in Table 1, are n turn strongly correlated with local political knowledge (income: R = .31, p ≤ .01; education: R = .30, p ≤ .01).