Abstract

Based on the call for the mandatory vote of young Chileans (+18) to approve or reject the draft of a new constitution for Chile in 2022, this research explored how they informed themselves about this political process and what was their assessment of the news to make their electoral decision. This context constitutes a unique scenario to contribute to the body of knowledge about the relationship between the consumption of news by young people and their involvement in political life, according to the opportunities that news offers to build their opinion. An ad-hoc quantitative survey was designed, applied online in 2023, to which 183 participants between 18 and 24 years old, mostly higher education students, responded. Young people consider it very important to vote in an informed manner, they are interested in current affairs, they value the professional work of journalists and they searched for news about the content of the constitutional text. However, for more than half of them, the news did not respond to their interests, despite the fact that this is for them one of the characteristics of quality news.