Journal of Electoral Studies

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Hard/Soft News Preference, Democratic Values and Voting

Bonnie Peng
2007 / 05
Volume 14, No.1

pp.85-117
10.6612/tjes.2007.14.01.85-117

Abstract

The news has softened in Taiwan as well as in most of the democratic societies. While people prefer more entertainment-related information on the media, scholars started worrying about the impact of soft news preference on voters' political knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine Taiwanese voters news preferences (hard/soft news) and how that related to their democratic values, political knowledge and voting. The results had found that people in Taiwan prefer reading soft news on newspaper and television. Age and education were the best variables predicting Taiwanese democratic values. Male, highly educated, read more newspapers, prefer hard news on the media, had higher democratic values, showed more factual knowledge toward politics. While there's no significant relationship between democratic values and people's voting on presidential election, their democratic values did significantly relate to their voting in 2004 Legislative election.

Keywords

democratic values

hard/soft news

political knowledge

voting