What is in the News today? How Media-Related Affect shapes Adolescents’ Stance towards the EU

Introduction. Adolescence is regarded as a formative period for political development. One important developmental context is media. Negative media valence of political content can foster populistic attitudes, which in turn decreases support of political institutions, such as the EU. Because media valence effects are short-lived, this study examined intra-individual associations of media valence with European identity commitment and affect towards the EU, as well as indirect effects via populistic attitudes across 10 days. Methods. We implemented a 10-day daily diary study with 371 adolescents from Germany (January to February 2022). Adolescents were on average 14.24 years old (SD = 0.55) and 60.4% were female. We estimated the hypothesized associations using multilevel structural equation models and dynamic structural equation models. Results. We found significant associations between populistic attitudes and negative affect towards the EU on the same day and the next day. The lagged effect became non-significant, when including both same day and lagged effects into one model. Populistic attitudes were not significantly associated with European identity commitment within days or across days. Negative media content was associated with higher populistic attitudes on the same day and indirectly associated with negative affect towards the EU (b = -0.01, 95% CI [-0.004, -0.010]). Conclusion. Negatively perceived political media content was associated with higher populistic attitudes and more negative affect towards the EU concurrently. Our results imply that media plays an important role for adolescents’ development.