Young Chileans Evaluate the News in order to decide how to Vote in 2022

Abstract

Based on the call for the mandatory vote of young Chileans to approve or reject the draft of a new constitution for Chile in 2022, this research explored how they informed themselves about this political process and what was their assessment of the news to make their electoral decision. An ad-hoc quantitative survey was designed, applied online in 2023, to which 183 participants between 18 and 24 years old, mostly higher education students, responded. Young people consider it very important to vote in an informed manner, they are interested in current affairs, they value the professional work of journalists and they searched for news about the constitutional process. However, for more than half of them, the news did not respond to their interests. This finding is particularly relevant, since when asked what quality news is for them, they refer to information that responds to their needs. It is likely that the news industry does not sufficiently consider this young audience, which constitutes an opportunity to get to know their interests.

Keywords

• news consumption
• young people
• informed vote
• political current affairs
• news interests