Media Consumption and Its Influence on Electoral Political Engagement: An Analysis From the Communication Mediation Model in the Context of the 2021 Mexican Federal Election

Abstract

Election campaigns provide a crucial moment in the relationship between political actors and the citizenry, with the media playing a key role in the transmission of relevant political information to the public—an activity that has a bearing on shifts in political attitudes and behaviors. The communication mediation model explains this media influence process as an indirect effect of media consumption on participation through the development of postconsumption orientations and reasoning on the message. Following the model, this article seeks to analyze whether the same process took place during the 2021 Mexican federal election campaign by conducting a two-wave panel survey, with a representative sample of 1,750 participants in the first wave and 596 in the second wave. The findings made it possible to determine how the model manages to explain the effect of political interest on electoral engagement through attention to campaign news and political conversation, both jointly and separately.