And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Zhengyi Xu, whose focus is on news avoidance in Switzerland. News has a critical democratic role to play, of course, and news avoidance is a key concern in this context – but the relationship between news avoidance and political participation has not yet been tested fully. Indeed, many studies have merely tested whether or how much people avoid the news, but reality may be more complex, and the strategies by which people avoid news (at different times, in different contexts, etc.) should be taken into account much more.
News avoidance intensity, news avoidance strategies, and general news use levels all need to be considered here, and in combination produce a better picture of the various types of intentional news avoidance that may exist. It may then also become possible to test how such intentional news avoidance types correlate with political participation practices – in the Swiss case, for instance, intention to participate in political referenda.
This project engaged in a three-wave panel study, in 2025, though the focus here is on only one of those waves; and identified some 1,600 cases of intentional news avoiders. It asked participants to rate their news avoidance intensity and general news use levels, and to choose one or more types from a long list of news avoidance strategies (which were grouped into general and targeted news avoidance strategies, with the latter focussing on specific news types, outlets, or timeframes). Finally, voting intention in an upcoming referendum was also tested – and political interest and civic duty attitudes were used as control variables.
Clustering of the results identified four clusters of strategies: high-intensity dual-strategy avoidance (high avoidance, low news use, both strategy domains); general-strategy avoidance (medium avoidance, low news use, general strategies); targeted-strategy avoidance; and low-intensity dual strategy avoidance. All of these reduced vote intention, but also correlated with political interest and civic duty, which turned out to be the stronger predictors of lower vote intention.
Such different avoidance types may have very different political implications: targeted-strategy avoiders, in particular, did not vary significantly in their likelihood to vote once political interest and civic duty were taken into account, and might simply manage their news consumption more effectively without avoiding ‘the news’ as such. Even overall, news avoidance may not be as problematic as us usually assumed.
