Growing Inequalities Through Motivations: A Moderated Mediation Analysis Between Socioeconomic Status, Political Interest and News Media Consumption in Sweden, 1990–2023

As we have transitioned toward media systems increasingly characterized by proliferation of media choices, public and scholarly concern regarding widening news consumption gaps have grown. Two types of gaps have been especially prominent in research on news audience fragmentation. The first is research building on the opportunity, motivation and abilities (OMA) framework, showing that individual motivations and preferences are becoming more important when it comes to news consumption. The second is research focused on how high-choice media environments might contribute to socioeconomic (SES) gaps in news consumption. We know from previous research that these two gaps are related since SES shapes political interest through socialization processes, which in turn drives news consumption. However, previous research lacks an integrated longitudinal perspective, testing whether this mediated relationship has increased over time. Addressing these shortcomings, we utilize 33 years of Swedish survey data (NRespondents = 47 884) to conduct a moderated mediation analysis, simultaneously studying the direct effect of socioeconomic status as well as its indirect – mediated through political interest – effect on news consumption. Results suggest that socioeconomic gaps in news consumption have grown and that an important driver of these differences might be due to an increasing indirect effect through political interest.