Mass media’s influence on attitudestowards the EU : Do people with different levels of news consumption differ in theirattitude towards the EU?

Abstract: The news media is an important institution for all democracies. It helps the citizens to keep informed and be able to take part of the public debate, but in recent years the gap between the active and the inactive news consumer has increased. Does it make any difference? In order to contribute to the field, this research paper is to make a quantitative analysis to look at whether people with a high consumption of news from the Swedish mass media differ in their attitude towards the EU. As an ordered logistic regression was not applicable when analyzing the categorical dependent variable, that are measuring attitudes towards the EU, three binary logistic regressions was instead used. The results show that individuals with a high consumption of news from the Swedish mass media have higher odds of having an opinion of a positive attitude toward the EU. The data used are however self provided and voluntary survey data,which contain various biases. The fact that it is only observed and not experimental data makes it impossible to estimate a causal effect, which instead is up to future research.