Jan Kleinnijenhuis

• Professor
• Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Most common methods for automatic text analysis in communication science ignore syntactic information, focusing on the occurrence and co-occurrence of individual words, and sometimes n-grams. This is remarkably effective for some purposes, but poses a limitation for fine-grained analyses into semantic relations such as who does what to whom and acc...

This article contends that an important driver of turnout is the national stories embraced by citizens. We suggest the notion of ‘story incentive,’ whereby adopting a group’s story components – those that connect the past, the future, and prominent national characters – motivates individuals to participate in that group’s political activities. Lean...

Over the period of 60 years of election debates between lead candidates of political parties in The Netherlands from 1959 to 2019 the proportional electoral system hardly changed. Electoral campaigns in the Netherlands are low-budget campaigns relying on free publicity through the media rather than on expensive political advertising, with many tele...

A sleeper effect of a message can be defined as a delayed increase in the effect size of that message. The sleeper metaphor entails its concern with the awakening of persuasive power after a period of sleep. A sleeper effect of messages from low‐credibility sources was established in the pioneering work of Carl Hovland and colleagues. Such an uncon...

The yet unproven Collatz conjecture maintains that repeatedly connecting even numbers n to n/2, and odd n to 3n+1, connects all natural numbers to a single tree with 1 as its root. Pruning ever more numbers from this tree until the density of pruned numbers relative to the natural numbers is arbitrarily close to 100% would prove that all numbers be...

Changes in political perceptions and preferences may result from the combined effects of news from various media. Estimating these combined effects requires the best possible, albeit different, measures of news obtained from self-selected mass media and social media that can be linked to panel survey data concerning perceptions and preferences. For...

The hostile media effect (HME) entails that partisanship incites hostile perceptions of media content. However, other research underscores that partisans selectively turn to like-minded media, resulting in a friendly media phenomenon (FMP). The present study suggests that the HME and FMP co-exist, and, furthermore, jointly affect people’s voting be...

The success of tech firms rests on their ownership of the algorithms for operating new platforms for the interactions among five groups of stakeholders in the markets of news, ads, and chats: stakeholders from the spheres of politics, journalism, the citizenry, the tech firms themselves, and other firms. Recent regulations that touch on property ri...

Issues are not neutral. This study about the Dutch 2016 referendum on the EU–Ukraine association treaty asks which issues dominated the news media in the campaign, how the news about these issues influenced the saliency of benefits and disadvantages of the treaty, and how the latter in turn influenced turnout and the vote. A content analysis of new...

Previous research shows effects of the advice from voting advice applications (VAAs) on party choice. These effects could be spurious because of common origins of the obtained advice and party choice in antecedent factors like prior voting, issue voting and campaign effects. Here three-wave panel surveys and media content data for the Dutch nationa...

Recent studies show that using Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) affects party preferences of voters, and hence leads to party switching. Party switching is a necessary but insufficient condition for volatility (a net switch of voters to other parties) and fragmentation (more parties gaining seats) at the aggregate level of electoral constituencies...

This paper investigates the influence of news agency Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANP) on the coverage and diversity of political news in Dutch national newspapers. Using computational text analysis, we analyzed the influence on print newspapers across three years (1996, 2008, and 2013) and compared influence on print and online newspapers in 20...

The European elections in 2014 were the first to be held after a long period in which EU-related news was prominent in the media. They were held after years of daily news about the euro crisis and after months of news about the popular uprising in the Ukraine against president Yanukovych, who had refused to sign the association agreement with the E...

On newspaper websites, journalists can observe the preferences of the audience in unprecedented detail and for low costs, based on the audience clicks (i.e. page views) for specific news articles. This article addresses whether journalists use this information to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. We analyzed the print a...

The prominence of party leaders in the media is one of the presumed causes of leader effects (i.e., the influence of party leader evaluation on the voting decision). Yet there is scant knowledge of the relationship between attention for party leaders in the news and the weight of party leader evaluations in the voting decision. This study fills thi...

Communicative complexity concerns the variety of issues and stakeholders (agenda complexity) and their associations (frame complexity) in the news. One issue may dominate news in crises (9/11, Katrina), but as soon as complexity recovers, uncertainty may decrease and the public mood may improve. The financial crisis in the United States, the United...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are the most often used political websites during election campaigns in multiparty systems. This article investigates whether their voting advice has an impact on the vote choice of different types of VAA users, taking into account voters’ previous vote, pre-campaign preference, horse race news coverage of each par...

Associative issue ownership refers to one of the prerequisites for representative democracy-public awareness of the issue priorities of competing political parties. This article addresses the question of how the instability of associative issue ownership at the micro level of individual voters, which could be due in part to election news and politi...

The paper explains antecedents and consequences of news during the BP oil spill crisis by analyzing newspaper and internet coverage as well as financial indicators. The study establishes the roles of routines in financial journalism and of BP’s public relations efforts in building the U.S. media agenda. The U.S. media agenda in turn bears a classic...

If humans are political animals, and language is their most versatile communication tool, then the old question what should be extracted from political texts to understand politics deserves renewed attention. Recent advances in the information and communication sciences have resulted in new means to process political texts, especially advances in t...

The media logic thesis holds that the content of political news is the product of news values and format requirements that media make use of to attract news consumers. This study tests whether three content characteristics – personalized, contest and negative coverage – manifest a single media logic by analysing whether they co-vary over time. It a...

During election campaigns, political parties deliver statements on salient issues in the news media, which are called issue positions. This article conceptualizes issue positions as a valued and longitudinal two-mode network of parties by issues. The network is valued because parties pronounce pro or con positions on issues in more or less extreme...

Whether financial news may contribute to market panics is not an innocent question. A positive answer is easily used as a legitimation to limit the freedom of financial journalists. Long-term effects of news are moreover inconsistent with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which maintains that new information gives immediately rise to a new equ...

In multiparty election campaigns, many political parties and candidates compete for media attention, voters, and a government majority. Negative campaigning, which is often newsworthy, is an attractive strategy in the competition for media attention. However, political support for another party offers an alternative strategy because it signals pref...

This paper contributes to the analysis of the interplay of public relations and news in crisis situations, and the conceptualization of strategic framing by introducing the idea of associative frames and the method of semantic network analysis to the PR research field. By building on a more advanced understanding of communication as process of soci...

Networks of Practice (NoPs) facilitate knowledge sharing among geographically dispersed organization members. This research tests whether social influence in NoPs is reinforced by actors’ embeddedness in practice (knowledge about informal content), organizational embeddedness (knowledge about formal organizational content), structural embeddedness...

Earning public understanding and acceptance through reports in the press is one of the oldest means–ends schemes in public relations (PR). Firms, governments, NGOs, and interest groups alike use the media to convey their message to their publics. Hence, media influence is a two‐step process. Whether PR efforts lead to news items in the media depend...

Veyor® is a trademark of Idea Works, Inc. It is a text analysis program that performs, either by itself or in combination with programs such as Qualrus® and Globalpoint®, not only word category counts, but also sentiment analysis. According to a newspaper article about a recent application to a campaign for the US Senate elections (Reed, 2010), the...

Analysis of political communication is an important aspect of political research. Thematic content analysis has yielded considerable success both with manual and automatic coding, but Semantic Network Analysis has proven more difficult, both for humans and for the computer. This article presents a system for an automated Semantic Network Analysis o...

This study poses the question of how public information contributes to citizen satisfaction or dissatisfaction with government policies. Public information efforts, “irrespective of their importance for the public’s welfare, do not make it onto the radar screens of social science researchers”, according to a recent review of Graber (Graber/Smith 20...

Since 1995 the techniques and capacities to store new electronic data and to make it available to many persons have become a common good. As of then, different organizations, such as research institutes, universities, libraries, and private companies (Google) started to scan older documents and make them electronically available as well. This has g...

The distribution of topic attention is an essential part in the political agenda setting literature. Which policy problem gets priority and when? The American datasets of the policy agendas projects (Washington and PennState University) consists of thousands of topic coded documents, such as Bills, State of the Union speeches, and articles from the...

Samenvatting Welk nieuws doet ertoe en hoeveel nieuws doet ertoe, en in welke mate hangt dit af van de politieke kennis van de ontvanger? Dit artikel beschrijft een longitudinale studie naar de verkiezingsstrijd voor het Nederlandse parlement in 2006.

Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues such as conducted by semantic network analysis. This article presents a system for automatically determining the polarity (positivity/negativity) of these relations by using techniques from...

The central question in this study is whether the power of the media agenda over the political agenda has recently increased. The agenda-building dynamics are established using cross-country time-series data on four issues, covering fifteen and eight years respectively of British and Dutch parliamentary debates and newspaper articles. Structural eq...

Earning public understanding and acceptance through reports in the press is one of the oldest means–ends schemes in public relations (PR). Firms, governments, NGOs, and interest groups alike use the media to convey their message to their publics. Hence, media influence is a two‐step process. Whether PR efforts lead to news items in the media depend...

Negativity is the tendency of humans to pay → selective attention to events and behaviors that could have a negative impact on themselves or their group. Selective attention to negative events by primary observers, such as journalists, may result in overly negative reports to those who were not witnesses, which may result in anger or fear (→ Fear I...

Party Advice Websites infer guidance for party choice by way of comparing personal issue positions of internet users with the issue positions of various parties. Such guidance or advice is based on a specific built-in Multi-Attribute-Utility-Decision rule (MAUD). In a large-scale simulation study the actual election outcomes of the 2006 elections i...

Party Advice Websites infer guidance for party choice by way of comparing personal issue positions of internet users with the issue positions of various parties. Such guidance or advice is based on a specific built-in Multi-Attribute-Utility-Decision rule (MAUD). In a large-scale simulation study the actual election outcomes of the 2006 elections i...

This study focuses on the effects of news and advertising expenditures on corporate reputation. Both advertisement expenditures and the tone (or tenor) of business news exert a positive influence on corporate reputation. In addition, advertising expenditures were found to magnify the effects of the tone of the news. In particular, moderately educat...

Different “paradigmatic” approaches to explain news effects on voting may supplement each other, because their starting points are based on different news types in political campaign news: news on issue positions of parties, news on real-world developments, news on support or criticism for parties, and news on success and failure of parties. Daily...

This article examines the influence of business news on corporate reputation. A panel survey was used to measure the reputations of six companies and two professional sectors. Media coverage was analyzed by focusing on the tone of two different types of news. News about the successes of the companies – such as higher profits – improved their reputa...

Effects of issues in business news on corporate reputation are often assumed, but less often put to a test. To study these effects, this study combines a recent extension of agenda-setting theory—the second level of agenda setting—with issue ownership theory. A content analysis of business news is linked to a panel survey to measure corporate assoc...

The aim of this study is to assess the relative strength of the reciprocal causal relationships between the political agenda (the party agenda), the mass media agenda and the public agenda. Although the research literature is rather confusing and inconclusive, three causal patterns have often been suggested. The economic theory of representative de...

The role of the media in the creation of distrust is much debated in political communication. Will negative news, for example, relentless attacks on political authorities, result in political cynicism or in a stimulation effect? By and large the media may stimulate political participation,but it is less clear when negative news will nullify this ef...

The 2002 Dutch election campaign - that at first glance seemed to be an extraordinary campaign due to the rise and assassination of Pim Fortuyn - provides an interesting case to answer the questions to what extent and in which way issues play a role in the considerations of voters to choose for a particular party. A representative panel survey stud...

This article elucidates the role of issue news and personality news in Germany and the Netherlands. A party with a popular leader is assumed to benefit from increased media attention. A party may also benefit from issue news. News on an issue favours its `issue owner' (e.g. the German Social Democrats in the case of news on social security). Good n...

The "core sentence approach" to semantic network analysis of texts, as implemented in CETA, is applied to monitor the coverage by the Dutch press of the advertising campaigns preceding the stock-exchange launches of the Dutch telecommunications company KPN (1994) and of the Dutch internet provider WOL (2000). The NETwork method represents discourse...

Television news is the main battlefield of democratic politics. How are politicians presented in this news and how do voters react to this presentation? Theory about the effects of attention for a politician in texts, sound bites or voice-overs on party preference is discussed in this article. The content of 457 news items from a public and commerc...

This article shows that issue coverage in the media partly explains both the political landslide at the 1994 elections in the Netherlands and the political continuity in the 1994 elections in Germany. Theories of issue voting guided the research. Issue ownership theory maintains that voters will remember which party has the best record of solving p...

This article shows that issue coverage in the media partly explains both the political landslide at the 1994 elections in the Netherlands and the political continuity in the 1994 elections in Germany. Theories of issue voting guided the research. Issue ownership theory maintains that voters will remember which party has the best record of solving p...

In a representative democracy the public has to be convinced that the priorities set in the public sector are based on the public’s attitudes. Alternatively, the public may be persuaded of the priorities set in the public sector. In either case the media play an important role in the transmission of political priorities to the mass public. The time...

The knowledge gap hypothesis states that segments of the population with higher education acquire knowledge from the mass media at a faster rate than the lower educated segments. This article states that the faster learning rate of highly educated persons, which is claimed by knowledge gap theory, rests upon their greater capacity to process comple...

Johan Galtung & Mari Holmboe Ruge (1965) hypothesize that the more consonant an event is with the mental image of what journalists expect to find, the more probable journalists will consider that event to be newsworthy. This article on foreign news in the Netherlands underpins this hypothesis, as well as the related hypotheses of unambiguity and ne...

Content analysis is a very tedious method of data collection. This paper addresses once more the question of whether and how computers may be used to facilitate content analysis in the coding stage. To interpret natural language automatically a computer program must be able to unravel the syntactical structure of sentences (parsing) and to trace th...

Research from the Netherlands suggests a relationship between the newspapers one reads and the opinions one holds on international affairs. After several alternative explanations are assessed, two remain as most plausible: that images of the world conveyed by newspapers affect readers' views; or that readers' basic political attitudes account for b...

Charles E. Osgood and his colleagues developed a technique for content analysis called `Evaluative Assertion Analysis' (Osgood, 1956). An elaboration of the technique will be presented here. Sentences are split up into nuclear sentences, which are predicating something about the relation between meaning objects. Meaning objects might be political a...

Increasing numbers of high quality tools and data sets are becoming available for the study of media content, providing an opportu-nity for more rapid progress in Communication Science if these tools and data sets could be effectively combined and shared. In order to do so, it would be beneficial to have a shared Data format that is flexible enough...

Easily accessible online discussion forums have greatly low-ered the hurdles for citizens to join political debates. In this paper we employ automated content analysis of online discussions which offers as a new opportunity to assess the agenda of online discussions unobtrusively. We focus on the twofold Research Question how previous communication...

Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues. This paper presents a system for automati- cally determining whether these relations are positive or negative by using techniques from Sentiment Analysis. We used a Machine Learning approa...

Graph-like data structures are central to the fields of So- cial Networks Analysis and Relational Content Analysis, and form the semantic backbone of Semantic Web (SW) and related formal represen- tations. Taking a Social Science perspective, we will inventory the possi- bilities and problems in using Knowledge Representation (KR) and SW techniques...

Relationships between actors and issues that are the object of study in communication science and political science often have at least two aspects. On the one hand these relationships are more or less salient, intense, frequent, and so on. On the other hand these relationships are more or less positive or negative. Such relationships resemble elem...

Vote advice applications offer the possibility to investigate the dimensionality of issue spaces in great detail, because of their multitude and diversity of included issues as compared election survey studies, expert surveys and media content analysis studies. During the campaign for the European parliamentary elections in 2009 almost a million Eu...

Título en la cubierta: Doing Research in Political Science: An Introduction to Comparative Methods and Statistics Introducción a los métodos de investigación comparativa y su uso en los ámbitos de las ciencias políticas en particular y de las ciencias sociales en general, orientado a estudiantes de licenciatura y posgrado en estos campos. Los autor...