Spanish Language Media Consumption and Latino Civic Engagement

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231209695
• Author: Walter Clark Wilson,Robert R. Preuhs,Bryan T. Gervais
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 316–327

© The Author(s) 2023

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10659129231209695

journals.sagepub.com/home/prq

Spanish Language Media Consumption and

Latino Civic Engagement

Walter Clark Wilson

1

, Robert R. Preuhs

2

, and

Bryan T. Gervais

1

Abstract

Spanish language media is linked to multiple forms of Latino political mobilization, including protest, naturalization, and

voting. However, recent research associates geographic access to Spanish language broadcasts with signif‌icantly lower

rates of Latino voter participation. We engage this controversy by exploring whether relative consumption of Spanish

and English language media shapes rates of civic and voter participation among Latinos using data from the 2016

Cooperative Multiracial Postelection Survey and our own 2021 survey.

1

Next, we test the hypothesis that Spanish

language media acts through politicized identities to shape Latino civic engagement, as some theorize. We f‌ind strong

association between Spanish language media consumption and politicized identities among Latinos but no evidence that

these identities constitute a conduit through which Spanish language media mobilizes. Instead, our results show that the

mobilizing effect of Spanish language media consumption on civic engagement is direct and independent of politicized

identity. These f‌indings indicate a need to explore whether Spanish language media consumption inf‌luenc es Latino

participation through differences with English language media in terms of content and/or fragmentation that better

educate Latinos to participate, reduce political alienation, or accomplish both.

Keywords

Latino, political participation, voting behavior, Spanish language media

Introduction

Does Spanishlanguage media (SLM) shape Latinopolitical

participation? If so, how? Recent research demonstrates

that access to SLM, measured in terms of its geographic

accessibility, is actuallyassociated with lower ratesof voter

turnout among Latinos (Velez and Newman 2019). By

contrast, manyother studies positively link SLM to various

forms of mobilization (Barreto et al. 2009;Barreto,

Merolla, and Soto 2011;Abrajano and Panagopoulos

2011;F´

elix, Gonz´

alez, and Ram´

ırez 2008;Panagopoulos

and Green 2011;Ram´

ırez 2013;Zepeda-Mill´

an 2017).

Ref‌ining our empirical understanding of this relationship

requires disentangling these apparent conf‌licts.

Scholarly understanding of the relationship between

SLM and Latino political participation also suffers from a

lack of explicit hypothesis testing to isolate the theoretical

mechanism(s) than animate the relationship. For example,

Garcia-Rios and Barreto (2016) theorize that SLM may

work alongside feelings of immigrant-linked fate to

construct politicized identities among Latinos and act

through those identities to inf‌luence greater campaign-

related participation and greater likelihood of voter par-

ticipation. However, the data examined in that study does

not permit an explicit test of the theoretical relationship,

forcing the scholars instead to rely upon proxy measures

to gauge the impact of SLM. Furthermore, research has

generally failed to contextualize the role of SLM as a

factor that acts alongside a much larger and potentially

more inf‌luential English language media (ELM) envi-

ronment. We move this scholarly conversation forward

through analyses that examine whether relative con-

sumption of SLM and ELM shape political behaviors and

explicitly test the theory that SLM consumption con-

structs and works through politicized identities to inf‌lu-

ence participation.

1

University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

2

Metropolitan State University, Denver, Denver, CO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Walter Clark Wilson, Department of Political Science and Geography,

University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, San Antonio, TX

78249, USA.

Email: walter.wilson@utsa.edu