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This article explores the change and continuity of how Taiwanese voters consume political information in the past 20 years. The analysis exploits five waves of Taiwan’s Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) face-to-face post-presidentialelection survey between 2004 and 2020 and reveals three major results. First, more than 80% of voters rely on television to consume political information, but the number relying on newspapers and radio is declining; meanwhile, Internet usage surpassed the newspaper as the second most common consumption method. Second, voters with different national identities and unification-independence preferences tend to select different newspapers and news channels. Meanwhile, the news channels in which the audience has a stronger political preference are much likely to be chosen by the voters as the main source of information. Nevertheless, the overall level of media polarization does not increase across time. Third, social media surpassed the radio as one of the important channels for political information, but the variety of the users’ age distribution exists across platforms, foretelling the future political impacts of the social media sites. In the end, this article briefly discusses the methodological challenges in studying political information consumption in this new information era. |
