Abstract

International literature demonstrates the influence of news media on the political attitudes and behaviors of citizens, stemming from the coverage and framing of politics. In the context of election campaigns, this news framing effect has usually been analyzed based on experimental designs, mainly through the manipulation of strategic game and issue frames. However, the need to conduct studies with greater realism has recently been raised, to increase the external validity and generalization of the findings. This approach, called experimental realism, seeks to link media content with opinion measurements to generate consumption indicators of certain types of news frames. Taking this procedure as a reference, this paper presents results on the impact of informative content consumption, focused on either the electoral strategy or programmatic proposals, in the development of the political engagement of citizens during the 2018 Mexican presidential campaign. The findings reveal an important effect of issue frame consumption on citizen political engagement according to all the measured indicators.