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Comparing Election News Coverage in Europe: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of the Approach
Abstract
The principal aim of this study is to further research on elections and news media coverage by identifying contemporary characteristics and tendencies across different European countries. This introductory chapter contextualizes the rationale and methodological approach for the study of election campaign coverage in six European countries (Croatia, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, and Spain). The theoretical framework situates the analysis in terms of the general trends identified in extant literature as well as broader contexts of European-wide politics such as populism, the Euro Crisis, and the migration crisis. It is these European contexts that informed the selection of countries for comparative analysis, which include four of these countries most deeply affected by the Euro Crisis (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) and two countries in which populism and the issue of immigration are to the fore (Croatia and Poland).
Zusammenfassung
Media are by far the voters’ most important source of information about elections and election campaigns. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the analysis of election (campaign) coverage is a long-standing tradition in communication science. Central questions in the analysis of media reporting on elections and campaigns address, for example, the amount and structure of coverage relating to topics, key actors and their evaluations.
Portuguese politics and mainstream media have been resistant to the recent spread of populism. This article examines the specific features of Portuguese politics and media that might explain the apparent exception, and puts it to test by analysing the prevalence of populist discourses and styles of communication in different types of online media. The sample is composed of mediated and unmediated messages on immigration and corruption, two issues that are commonly present in populist discourses by both right- and left-wing political actors. Overall, the content analysis shows that although populist discourses are not recurrent in politics and media, social media have amplified the visibility of this kind of discourses in Portugal.
This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based “identity politics” of the “new social movements” that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.
This study investigated how journalistic story frames can affect the thoughts and feelings of readers. Two hundred and seventy-eight students participated in two studies, reading and responding to a fictitious story about possible reductions in state funding of their university. Stories were presented in one of four randomly assigned versions, all containing the same information, but varying in their opening and closing paragraphs according to the frame employed: human interest, conflict, or personal consequences. A control version contained the common body only. In Study 1, thoughts listed by participants indicated that the news frames—although they had no influence on the volume of cognitive responses—significantly affected the topical focus and evaluative implications of thoughts generated. In Study 2, evaluations and opinions offered by participants indicated that the news frames also subtly could affect audience decision making about matters of public policy. Implications for shaping public opinion are discussed.
This study aims to shed light on the news selection process by examining the news values currently operational in British newspapers. The study takes as its starting point Galtung and Ruge's widely cited taxonomy of news values established in their 1965 study and puts these criteria to the test in an empirical analysis of news published in three national daily UK newspapers. A review of Galtung and Ruge's original study as well as a wider review of related literature is provided. The findings of the news content analysis are used to evaluate critically Galtung and Ruge's original criteria and to propose a contemporary set of news values.
The concept of negativity in political news has not reached the status of a homogenous, overarching theoretical concept. This article proposes conceptual understandings, categorizations and practical operationalizations of negativity in the news that reflect the consensus of existing work paying special attention to recent European research. This work aims to systematize existing concepts and categories in order to increase comparability and cumulativity of empirical evidence. To structure and standardize dimensions of negativity in the news we differentiate firstly between negativity and confrontation, secondly between frame-related negativity and individual actor-related negativity, and thirdly between non-directional and directional dimensions of negativity.
This article provides a common set of indicators and matrice-based classifications of negativity (and its antithesis) in the news to measure and categorize its intensity and multi-dimensionality.
Although many scholars dismiss allegations of bias in the mainstream US media, careful research on bias can illuminate media effects on political power and public policy. This article refines framing theory to provide a theoretical foundation for systematic studies of bias. It suggests that scholars distinguish framing from other communication by its diachronic nature and its cultural resonance. Despite journalists’ best efforts, framing often favors one side over another in political disputes. Slanted framing results from the interaction of real world developments, cultural norms, and journalistic decision rules with the sometimes proficient and other times maladroit efforts of competing elites to manage the news. A case study of 2008 presidential campaign coverage focusing on Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin illustrates how slanted framing can shift over time with changes in these interactions. The findings imply that, contrary to many critics’ contentions, unbalanced news does not arise from the presumably stable personal ideologies of journalists.
Personalization has become a central concept in discussions on how political news, and election coverage in particular, has changed over time. The general belief is that the focus of news coverage has shifted from parties and organizations to candidates and leaders. However, the evidence is far from conclusive. This is due in no small part to a lack of conceptual clarity and an absence of common operationalizations which are a major cause of the unclear or conflicting conclusions about the personalization of political news. This article seeks to remedy this shortcoming. It presents a model for comprehending the personalization of political news based on a review of relevant studies. The article makes a series of recommendations for how the concept might be operationalized for an analysis of media content in order to enable cross-nationally comparative research.
A key concept in research on the media coverage of politics is the game or strategy frame. Contrasted with coverage of politics as issues, the framing of politics as a strategic game is marked by features such as winning and losing as the central concern and a focus on how candidates or parties are doing in opinion polls. The pervasiveness of such framing is, however, disputed since (1) the way in which the frames are conceptualized and operationalized differs significantly; and (2) while some use terms such as ‘game frame’ and ‘strategy frame’ as synonymous, others argue that there is a conceptual difference between them. Against this background, this article reviews research on the media’s framing of politics as a strategic game, what concepts have been used, and how they have been operationalized; and suggests a synthesis and ways of improving conceptual clarity and comparability in research on the media’s use of strategy and/or game frames.
The overall purpose of this article is to review theory and research on interpretive journalism, one of the key concepts in research on the style and character of news journalism. While it is often claimed that news journalism over recent decades has changed from being predominantly descriptive to becoming increasingly interpretive, our review suggests that there is a lack of systematic research in this area. The literature is furthermore characterized by different conceptualizations and operationalizations of interpretive journalism, as well as by different normative assumptions. Taken together, this suggests not only insufficient conceptual clarity, but also problems related to the comparability and cumulativity of findings. To remedy this, and based on our review of how interpretive journalism has been conceptualized and operationalized, this article suggests how interpretive journalism should be conceptualized and operationalized in order to increase conceptual clarity, comparability across studies, and ultimately research cumulativity.
Using a simplified psychology of perception and some additional assumptions, a system of twelve factors describing events is presented that together are used as a definition of 'newsworthiness'. Three basic hypotheses are presented: the additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news; the complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other since if one factor is present it is less necessary for the other factors to be present for the event to become news; and the exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news. This theory is then tested on the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuba crises of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March-April 1964, and the data are in the majority of cases found to be consistent with the theory. A dozen additional hypotheses are then deduced from the theory and their social implications are discussed. Finally, some tentative policy impli cations are formulated.
In the context of the development of prototypic assessment instruments in the areas of cognition, personality, and adaptive functioning, the issues of standardization, norming procedures, and the important psychometrics of test reliability and validity are evaluated critically. Criteria, guidelines, and simple rules of thumb are provided to assist the clinician faced with the challenge of choosing an appropriate test instrument for a given psychological assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The scientific debate about populism has been revitalised by the recent rise of extreme-right parties in Western Europe. Within the broad discussion about populism and its relationship with extreme-right, this article is confined to three topics: a conceptual, an epistemological and an empirical issue. First, taking a clear position in the ongoing definition struggle, populism is defined primarily as a specific political communication style. Populism is conceived of as a political style essentially displaying proximity of the people, while at the same time taking an anti-establishment stance and stressing the (ideal) homogeneity of the people by excluding specific population segments. Second, it is pointed out that defining populism as a style enables one to turn it into a useful concept that has too often remained vague and blurred. Third, drawing on an operational definition of populism, a comparative discourse analysis of the political party broadcasts of the Belgian parties is carried out. The quantitative analysis leads to a clear conclusion. In terms of the degree and the kinds of populism embraced by the six political parties under scrutiny, the extreme-right party Vlaams Blok behaves very differently from the other Belgian parties. Its messages are a copybook example of populism.
This article proposes integrating the insights generated by framing, priming, and agenda-setting research through a systematic effort to conceptualize and understand their larger implications for political power and democracy. The organizing concept is bias, that curiously undertheorized staple of public discourse about the media. After showing how agenda setting, framing and priming fit together as tools of power, the article connects them to explicit definitions of news slant and the related but distinct phenomenon of bias. The article suggests improved measures of slant and bias. Properly defined and measured, slant and bias provide insight into how the media influence the distribution of power: who gets what, when, and how. Content analysis should be informed by explicit theory linking patterns of framing in the media text to predictable priming and agenda-setting effects on audiences. When unmoored by such underlying theory, measures and conclusions of media bias are suspect.
The study of political communication and election research has been closely intertwined ever since the end of the Second World War. However, there is still a troubling lack of comparative research with regard to election news coverage in different countries. Thus, the purpose of this article is to compare election news coverage in Sweden and Norway. More specifically, this study focuses on the use of different frames, such as game versus issue framing, episodic versus thematic framing, the journalistic style and the origins of the news stories in the two countries. As Sweden and Norway are very similar, and both belong to the democratic corporatist model of media and politics, this study follows the most similar systems design. Thus, the main hypothesis is that similar political and media systems will produce similar news coverage. The results, however, show that although the election news coverage was rather similar in Swedish and Norwegian newspapers, some significant differences were found. The article discusses these results using the concepts of structural and contextual biases.
European media systems have gone through major changes in the last few decades, and these changes have included increased opportunity structures for the dissemination of populist messages. Chapter 12 (‘Switzerland’) rightly states that the disappearance of the traditional party press, increased media ownership concentration, dependence on advertising, and a stronger orientation toward news values have worked in favor of a growing populist discourse. The newly established online media are seen as having a high afnity to populism’s rhetorical persuasion because both aim for the “quick kick/click” with a broad audience. As was stated in Chapter 1 in this volume, the role that the media play in the dissemination of populism is largely under-explored. In the classical research literature dealing with populism (see, e.g., Canovan, 1981; Taggart, 2000), communication and media are not addressed at all. When political scientists make the media their subject, they see the media mostly only as a neutral platform for populist leaders’ appearances and messages. One exception is Mudde (2007), who dedicates at least a few pages to this topic in his book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (pp. 248-253). He elaborates in particular on the assumption that tabloids and commercial television share a close relationship with populist communication.
List of Tables List of Figures Preface Acknowledgements The Presidentialization Debate Presidentialization of Presentation and Impact Explaining Leader Effects Media and Leader Effects Scale and Durability of Leader Effects Conclusion Index
Political personalization is a process in which politicians become the main anchor of interpretation and evaluation in the political arena. This entry contains definitions of the different types of personalization studied and reviews the literature citing evidence of their occurrence. It then elaborates on antecedents of the personalization trend and examines its variations across time and countries, and its manifestations in the international arena. Finally, it discusses positive and negative implications of personalization for democratic processes, voting behavior, and political interest and knowledge.
This article studies the impact of right and left moderate political orientation of newspapers on the levels of plurality in the news coverage of the Euro Crisis in 20 newspapers from 10 European countries through a methodology based on Simpson’s D index. The expectation of finding distinct patterns of coverage leading to high levels of plurality was not fully supported and the results have shown that national frames influence levels of overall plurality more than political ideology.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
In their introduction to this volume, Yves Mény and Yves Surel draw a distinction between ‘popular democracy’ and ‘constitutional democracy’, the two pillars on which the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic regimes rest. The popular democracy pillar is identified with an emphasis on the role of the demos that is, the free association of citizens, the maintenance of free elections, and the freedom of political expression. Popular democracy entails government by the people. The constitutional pillar, on the other hand, is identified with an emphasis on the institutional requirements for good governance—the establishment of rules and constraints limiting executive autonomy, the guaranteeing of individual and collective rights, and the maintenance of a system of checks and balances intended to prevent the abuse of power. The constitutional pillar may be associated with the defence of the public good, entailing government for the people. For Mény and Surel, an ideal democracy should aim to establish an equilibrium between both pillars.
This book considers why the level of party presidentialization varies from one country to another, and how constitutional structures and party genetics affect both the level and the degree it is present. Presenting an international collection of case studies from the US, Latin America, Australia, Japan and Europe, including France, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Ukraine, it examines how the presence of presidential features in political parties varies in terms of the constitutional framework. Highlights the importance of institutions in political life, the case studies provide empirical evidence that no stable presidentialization is possible outside regimes where a presidential dynamic is introduced by the institutions.
Many fear that democracies are suffering from a legitimacy crisis. This book focuses on ‘democratic deficits’, reflecting how far the perceived democratic performance of any state diverges from public expectations. Pippa Norris examines the symptoms by comparing system support in more than fifty societies worldwide, challenging the pervasive claim that most established democracies have experienced a steadily rising tide of political disaffection during the third-wave era. The book diagnoses the reasons behind the democratic deficit, including demand (rising public aspirations for democracy), information (negative news about government) and supply (the performance and structure of democratic regimes). Finally, Norris examines the consequences for active citizenship, for governance and, ultimately, for democratization. This book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of comparative politics, public opinion, political culture, political behavior, democratic governance, political psychology, political communications, public policymaking, comparative sociology, cross-national survey analysis and the dynamics of the democratization process.
The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News examines how changes in the news media since the golden age of television--when three major networks held a near monopoly on the news people saw in the United States--have altered the way presidents communicate with the public and garner popular support. How did Bill Clinton manage to maintain high approval ratings during the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Why has the Iraq war mired George Bush in the lowest approval ratings of his presidency? Jeffrey Cohen reveals how the decline of government regulation and the growth of Internet and cable news outlets have made news organizations more competitive, resulting in decreased coverage of the president in the traditional news media and an increasingly negative tone in the coverage that does occur. He traces the dwindling of public trust in the news and shows how people pay less attention to it than they once did. Cohen argues that the news media's influence over public opinion has decreased considerably as a result, and so has the president's ability to influence the public through the news media. This has prompted a sea change in presidential leadership style. Engaging the public less to mobilize broad support, presidents increasingly cultivate special-interest groups that often already back the White House's agenda. This book carries far-reaching implications for the future of presidential governance and American democracy in the era of new media.
This book explores the political implications of the human tendency to prioritize negative information over positive information. Drawing on literatures in political science, psychology, economics, communications, biology, and physiology, this book argues that “negativity biases” should be evident across a wide range of political behaviors. These biases are then demonstrated through a diverse and cross-disciplinary set of analyses, for instance: in citizens' ratings of presidents and prime ministers; in aggregate-level reactions to economic news, across 17 countries; in the relationship between covers and newsmagazine sales; and in individuals' physiological reactions to network news content. The pervasiveness of negativity biases extends, this book suggests, to the functioning of political institutions - institutions that have been designed to prioritize negative information in the same way as the human brain.
Populist radical right (PRR) parties are on the rise in Western Europe. Where do the electoral successes of these parties come from? First, it has been shown that the opening of borders has fuelled the divide between the ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of globalisation. The ‘losers’ are individuals who feel threatened by international competition. They vote for PRR parties because they agree with their nativist, populist and Eurosceptic positions. Second, various social and political developments have facilitated the success of these parties. Some examples of these developments are increased electoral volatility, the ideological convergence of the mainstream parties, and increasing immigration and unemployment. Third, PRR parties themselves are, to a large extent, responsible for their own successes. Without their increasingly moderated messages and profiles, their often appealing external and internal leaders, and their well-institutionalised party organisations, their (long-term) successes would not have been possible. Most probably, the PRR party family will remain with us for a while.
Populism has been on the rise for some time in Europe now, and its rise has been one of the key concerns of Peter Mair. He has linked it to the increasing erosion of the representative function of European party systems. The spectre that haunted him was ‘partyless democracy’, a democratic regime where parties had lost their representative function, which opened the door for unmediated populist protest. While largely sharing his interpretation of the overall structural trends giving rise to the populist challenges in Western Europe, the article is critical of the static character of his assessment. It suggests that there are three forms of ‘protest populism’, all of which may eventually end up transforming the West European party systems in the name of the new structuring conflicts that characterise contemporary European societies. In addition, it proposes to extend the scope of Peter’s argument to the less established democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.
As a key feature of the contemporary political landscape, populism stands as one of the most contentious concepts in political science. This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that this new category captures an important dimension of contemporary populism that is missed by rival approaches. In doing so, we put forward an inductive model of populism as a political style and contextualise it within the increasingly stylised and mediatised milieu of contemporary politics by focusing on its performative features. We conclude by considering how this concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream and its implications for democratic politics.
There has been a quiet revolution in news reporting during the past few decades. The traditional descriptive style of reporting has given way to an interpretive style that empowers journalists by giving them more control over content. One consequence is a form of news coverage that focuses on the negative aspects of politics. This development contributes to the public's dissatisfaction with its political leaders and institutions and makes it more difficult for officials to govern effectively. The news media's version of reality is exceedingly narrow and cannot be justified by either the journalists' knowledge of political relationships or their position in the political system. The problem would be lessened by a model of reporting that subordinates the voice of the journalist and aims for a more balanced portrayal of the workings of the political system.
In this paper I apply the definition of populism that I laid out in P. Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000) and argue that recent developments in Europe provide a fertile ground for the emergence of populism. Europe is taken to in its widest sense to include the European Union as well as the ‘wider Europe’. The argument of the paper is that populism will emerge (and has already appeared) in many different forms and will appear as a series of fractured instances. Combined with the self‐limiting effects of populism this means that populism will not amount to a wider ‘European’ force but its appearance does highlight dilemmas of representative politics in Europe.
In 1992, the Israeli parliament enacted the new Basic Law: The Government, which provides Israel with the distinction of being the only country to have direct popular election of its Prime Minister (beginning with the next election, scheduled for mid-1996). This new law not only effectively alters the electoral system, but also changes the entire political system in Israel, replacing its pure parliamentary system with a new, hybrid and unique regime type. This article describes the circumstances that brought about the recent reforms in Israel, delineates the electoral changes which were adopted, and analyzes whether Israel has switched from a parliamentary to a presidential political system.
Recent controversy over negative television campaign commercials has focused on their effects on voters. Proponents of the demobilization hypothesis claim that negative ads undermine political efficacy and depress voter turnout. Others have suggested a stimulation hypothesis, arguing that such advertising may have an invigorating effect on the electorate. Empirical tests of competing claims demand improved measures of real voters' exposure to real ads in the context of real campaigns. We develop a new approach to estimating exposure outside the lab that combines respondent viewing behavior and the strategic decisions of campaigns. Using this combined measure, we find no evidence that exposure to negative advertising depresses turnout. Instead exposure to negative ads appears to increase the likelihood of voting. We find this effect when we estimate exposure with our new measure, as well as when we use a very different perceptual measure of ad tone.
There are vast literatures on the ways in which media content differs from reality, but we thus far have a rather weak sense for how exactly the representation of various topics in media differs from the distribution of information in the real world. Drawing on the gatekeeping literature, and utilizing a new automated content-analytic procedure, this article portrays both media content and “reality” as distributions of information. Measuring these allows us to identify the mechanism by which the distribution of information in the real world is transformed into the distribution of information in media; we can identify the gatekeeping function. Reporting on unemployment serves as a test case. Subsequent analyses focus on inflation and interest rates and on differences across Democratic and Republican presidencies. Results are discussed as they relate to negativity, to economic news, and to the broader study of distributions of information in political communication and politics.
The aim of this study is to give some systematic insights into how Irish media tend to report an election campaign. The main focus will be on their attitudes toward and treatment of the competing parties and candidates. Content analysis data from television newscasts and campaign stories in four of the largest newspapers is used to investigate three different forms of media bias: coverage bias, agenda bias, and statement bias. We find that Irish media tend to grant disproportionate amounts of coverage to the government parties, Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats; the more prominent the coverage, the less proportionate it becomes. The extent to which media take the freedom to ‘distort’ party agendas in their reporting appears to depend on party size, campaign strategy and the acquired status and acceptance of a party amongst the political and media establishment. Most notable, however, is the predominantly negative attitude of all Irish print media towards political actors. Instead of a polarised partisan press, as for example in the UK, in Ireland we seem to be faced with a rather homogenous anti‐politics bias.
In a study of Swedish news media, 1912-84, a distinction is made between news values, regarded as more or less permanent, and changing news ideologies, conceived as an outflow of other ideologies. In statements concerning the broadcasting media three periods of different news ideologies are identified. They all seem to have had a strong impact both on the selection of news and on the selection of perspectives applied in the news.
This article looks at the personalization of politics, starting with a careful examination of the evidence that leaders are becoming more important. The role of electronic media in personalizing politics and politicians is examined, along with institutions and political leadership. The concept 'political priming' is introduced, which is the process where leaders are evaluated by voters based on the leader's performance on issues considered important to the voters. The consequences of the personalization of politics and the decline of electoral participation and parties are discussed in the last portion of the article.
Reports on the state of the horserace and analysis of the candidates’ strategies are pervasive themes in news coverage of campaigns. Various explanations have been suggested for the dominance of strategy-oriented news over hard news. The most frequently identified factors are the length of the modern campaign, the built-in conflict between journalists and campaign operatives, and the pressures of the marketplace. This article provides a test of the market hypothesis. Given access to a wide variety of news reports about the presidential campaign during the weeks immediately preceding the 2000 election, we find that voters were drawn to reports on the horserace and strategy. Strategy reports proved especially popular among readers with higher levels of political engagement. In closing, we consider what journalists might do to make stories about the issues more relevant and marketable.
The direct PM election model features as an ‘empty cell’ in typologies of political regimes. A more fine grained analysis of the model shows that it depends on the choices made on three institutional parameters (object of the election, electoral system, legislative/executive relationship) whether it constitutes a distinct regime type. A comparison of nine examples confirms that the label of a direct PM election covers a wide array of institutional designs. A direct PM election may involve a full-fledged presidentialisation, but it may also imply a marginal adaptation of the parliamentary system. The model can only be considered as an intermediate regime type when it combines the exclusive electoral origin of the executive with a parliamentary legislative/executive relationship.