Digital (and Traditional) Media Usage in Spanish Electoral Campaigns

This chapter aims to analyze the different patterns of access to political and electoral information among Spanish voters during the campaign of the general elections in April 2019. To this end, a statistical analysis has been carried out using the post-electoral survey of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas of the April 2019 general elections. The bivariate analysis shows that there is a significant gap between voters of new and old parties in access to information: the consumption of political and electoral information via the Internet and social networks is much more frequent among voters of the new parties (Podemos, Vox and Citizens) than in those of the traditional parties (PP and PSOE). Likewise, the multivariate analysis shows that this relationship is mainly explained by age differences: the voters of the new parties are younger on average, which explains the greater access to online sources. The differences in television exposure are maintained even considering these demographic differences: voters of the new parties are less exposed to TV than those of the old parties. Finally, a second analysis reveals that the electorate of both populist parties (Vox and UP) is more prone to use online resources to gather political-electoral information during the campaign than the voters of Ciudadanos. This finding is in line with the literature on populist political communication.