Community-Centered Ethnic Media and Latino Political Engagement

• In Event: The Media's Role in Forming and Reinforcing Political Identity and Community

Abstract

Does community-centered ethnic media promote the political engagement of ethnic minority immigrants? This is an important question facing Western democracies where large segments of their immigrant population take part in the democratic process at lower rates than their non-immigrant population. In recent years, community-centered ethnic media outlets (CCEMOs) have grown across the United States, providing immigrant populations with information about local, state, and national politics. Unlike the mainstream media, CCEMOs are influenced by the communities they serve, provide political information with little in the way of entertainment, and their content is often in the served communities' native language. CCEMOs therefore enrich the informational environment available to immigrant communities, decreasing costs of acquiring and processing political information, and thus possibly promoting immigrant political engagement. In this article, we assess whether CCEMOs durably affect political attitudes and beliefs by drawing on two pre-registered multi-site, multi-wave field experiments of Spanish-speaking Latinos. These experiments randomly incentivized Spanish-speaking participants in Arizona, California and North Carolina to consume content from a CCEMO or a local alternative for two consecutive months. Our findings suggest that enriching information environments may be one avenue for closing participation gaps between immigrant and non-immigrant groups in the United States.

Authors

• Stephanie Zonszein, University of California Berkeley

• Yamil Velez, Columbia University