| Summary: | Blekesaune, Elvestad and Aalberg (2012) demonstrates that an increasing segment of the European electorate, seems to dismiss information opportunities through the media. If voters continuously are preferring not to be exposed to political news, how can they trust themselves to be well informed about politics? The assumption of «media malaise» and hypothesis of cognitive mobilisation provides different perspectives on the matter. This paper examines how media exposure affects the citizen’s evaluation of their knowledge about politics, and as a result whether internal efficacy have been increasing or decreasing over time. As media is varying between media systems as defined by Hallin and Mancini (2004), this paper also tests whether internal efficacy is varying between media regimes. By using multilevel modelling and European Social Survey-data the main findings indicates a strong positive relationship between media exposure and political efficacy. This suggests support for the hypothesis of mobilisation. The analysis also indicates a slight decrease in internal efficacy between 2002 and 2008, and significantly lower internal efficacy in polarized pluralist media regimes than in other media regimes. However, the difference between the media systems is not significant when using all European countries as a sample.
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