Rens Vliegenthart's research while affiliated with Wageningen University & Research and other places
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Publications (199)
In this article, we provide a response to Teun van Dijk’s criticism of the framing perspective on social movements, as expressed in his article ‘Analyzing Frame Analysis. A Critical Review of Framing Studies in Social Movement Research’. We argue that a more constructive tone is warranted and explain how his criticism is largely based on a selectiv...
Politicians regularly bargain with colleagues and other actors. Bargaining dynamics are central to theories of legislative politics and representative democracy, bearing directly on the substance and success of legislation, policy, and on politicians’ careers. Yet, controlled evidence on how legislators bargain is scarce. Do they apply different st...
Previous research has demonstrated that both visibility of parties, party leaders, candidates, and topics, and the sentiment of this coverage can affect people’s decision in the ballot box. Most of this research was, however, done in the period before social media gained importance which has drastically changed the media consumption of citizens. Th...
Topics and frames are at the heart of various theories in communication science and other social sciences, making their measurement of key interest to many scholars. The current study compares and contrasts two main deductive computational approaches to measure policy topics and frames: Dictionary (lexicon) based identification, and supervised mach...
News diversity is an important concern of journalism scholars, as its presence or absence can have a profound effect on democratic debate and the information available to citizens. Many have speculated that news diversity decreases over time, due to changing economic circumstances. This expectation especially applies to newspapers. Using nearly two...
Organizations realize that their license to operate and the supportive behavior of their stakeholders relate to how they come across. If the identity of an organization is not a single, but multiple it may face unique challenges in strategic communication. The purpose of this study is to identify how the reputation and legitimacy of such a multiple...
Scholars have raised concerns that on many issues, citizens are reluctant to trust factual evidence and statistics. One factor that has been shown to impact the perceived truth in statistics is how they are presented, where negatively framed statistics are perceived as truer than positive. This study explores when this bias applies and not. Results...
Social media are increasingly important in the news menu of media users. Differences in news production processes between traditional and social media may lead to differences in how political and social issues are depicted, and this may, eventually, have consequences for the information that reaches citizens about an issue. Against this background,...
Lower levels of news use are generally understood to be associated with less political engagement among citizens. But while some people simply have a low preference for news, others avoid the news intentionally. So far little is known about the relationship between active news avoidance and civic engagement in society, a void this study has set out...
A key problem with research on news media trust is that it has mostly focused on general media trust and that there is limited research on how media trust might vary across levels of analysis. In this paper, we seek to remedy this by investigating whether news media trust differs depending on the topic of news coverage and whether topical trust can...
p>Conflict framing is key in political communication. Politicians use conflict framing in their online messages (e.g., criticizing other politicians) and journalists in their political coverage (e.g., reporting on political tensions). Conflicts can take a variety of forms and can provoke different reactions. However, the literature still lacks a sy...
This paper focuses on the content features of intentional deceptive information in the news (i.e., fake news) and on social media. Based on an extensive review of relevant literature (i.e., political journalism and communication, computational linguistics), we take stock of existing knowledge and present an overview of the structural characteristic...
Is irrational risk-avoiding behavior related to news media’s heightened attention for the negative and exceptional? Based on the theoretical approaches of mediatization and cultivation, it is hypothesized how news media can present an overly negative and biased reality that can have a severe impact on society. Focusing on the case of travel acciden...
This study investigates the degree of news avoidance during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Based on two panel surveys conducted in the period April–June 2020, this study shows that the increased presence of this behavior, can be explained by negative emotions and feelings the news causes by citizens. Moreover, news av...
While increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to news avoidance, there are only few studies taking the distinction between intentional and unintentional news avoidance into consideration, and none that has investigated the linkage between the two types of news avoidance and knowledge about politics and society. To fill this void, this study...
The corona crisis of 2020 took many by surprise. Quite suddenly, politicians had to make drastic decisions to guarantee public health, affecting basic civil liberties. In justifying their decisions, politicians internationally reverted back to a direct staging of experts to legitimize their proposals for what internationally became known as the “lo...
Ample work in political communication showed that high-level politicians get more media attention than their lower ranking colleagues. With power comes media attention. More than hard work, charisma, or experience, it is the political function performed by politicians that is the crucial factor in explaining how much media attention they receive. B...
This study investigates the representative patterns of MPs with immigrant backgrounds in the case of the Netherlands. Departing from existing literature on minority representatives, we claim that minority representatives can adopt suppressive, as well as supportive, framings when addressing constituencies with whom they share similar backgrounds. A...
An increasing number of climate lawsuits worldwide address responsibilities of climate change mitigation or adaptation. Yet, we know little about wider socio-political consequences of climate change litigation. This study focusses on the successful case of Urgenda vs. the Netherlands, which has created precedence for similar lawsuits against govern...
Digital information settings may not only offer an opportunity structure for democratic deliberation, but also facilitate the occurrence of negative phenomena – such as incivility, hate speech and false information. Even though extant literature has provided theoretical arguments for a discursive affinity between false or deceptive information and...
Cognitive complexity is a concept that allows scholars to distinguish unidimensional thinking from multidimensional thinking, which allows citizens to identify and integrate various perspectives of a topic. Especially in times of fake news, fact-free politics, and affective polarization, the news media would ideally foster such complex political un...
Research indicates that the reach of fake news websites is limited to small parts of the population. On the other hand, data demonstrate that large proportions of the public know about notable fake news stories and believe them. These findings imply the possibility that most people hear about fake news stories not from fake news websites but throug...
In contemporary high-choice media environments, the issue of media trust and its impact on people's media use has taken on new importance. At the same time, the extent to which people trust the news media and how much it matters for their use of different types of media is not clear. To lay the groundwork for future research, in this article we off...
This paper analyzes the mutual influence between media and political agendas in the Netherlands and Switzerland. While these two countries share a number of similarities, they also exhibit some important differences (e.g. the frequency of parliamentary meetings) that are likely to affect the patterns of influence. Time-series cross-section analyses...
This article studies the asymmetric effects of credit and blame attributions in economic news on government evaluations. We rely on a dataset combining a manual content analysis of Dutch economic news (print, television, online; N = 5,630) with a three-wave panel survey (N = 3,240) that was fielded in 2015. Results show that people who are exposed...
The presence of news factors in journalistic products has been abundantly researched, but investigations into their actual impact on the news production process are scarce. This study provides a large-scale analysis of why news factors matter: Whether, how, and which news factors affect the prominence of news items and does this differ per outlet t...
This article studies the impact of economic news on government support and the mediating role of people’s national (sociotropic) and personal (egotropic) economic evaluations. Employing two complementary studies, a large literature is contributed to by adding a media perspective to the economic voting hypothesis. The first study was fielded in 2015...
Building on the agenda-setting theory, this study investigates the effect of corporations’ visibility and tone in news coverage on reputation. More specifically, we examine the buffering role that prior reputation may have for the potential damaging impact of news coverage. Providing a stringent test of causality, data from an automated content ana...
This article scrutinizes the method of automated content analysis to measure the tone of news coverage. We compare a range of off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools to manually coded economic news as well as examine the agreement between these dictionary approaches themselves. We assess the performance of five off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools...
Multiple-identity organizations possess identity characteristics that belong to different and potentially conflicting value systems. How exactly these identities are projected in such an organization’s external communication has hardly been investigated. Here, we present a method that provides a systematic way to analyse the projected identity of m...
Previous studies using aggregate-level designs demonstrated that the tone of economic news affects consumer confidence. However, the individual-level mechanisms underlying this effect remain to be investigated: It is not clear which consumer confidence attributes are most susceptible to media effects. Theoretically, we integrate the economic voting...
How do political parties react to different signals from society indicating the saliency of a particular social problem? Are all parties equally responsive to all signals or do certain signals prove more effective in engaging some parties than others? We address these questions from an agenda-setting perspective. In particular, we investigate how m...
This study investigates the role of public opinion for members of parliaments (MPs) in a time in which communication about the will of “the People” is high on the political agenda. By means of face-to-face elite interviews with Dutch MPs, we explore who politicians perceive as “the People,” how they assess “the will of the People,” and how this tra...
This study provides a longitudinal, cross-national account of the relationship between negative news coverage and consumer confidence across all twenty-eight European Union (EU) member states for the period 2005–2017. We rely on an extensive data set of international news agency coverage and a range of economic indicators retrieved from Eurostat. E...
It has been assumed that populism has become mainstream in the Western world, and that the media have substantially contributed to populism’s success and omnipresence in politics and society. To investigate populist elements in media coverage, extant research has mainly focused on election periods, or media populism in specific types of coverage an...
To pass or not to pass through the news gates? That is a key question with respect to the relationship between large commercial firms and the journalistic outlets that publish news regarding them. Whereas previous research has considered how corporate communication affects media content, the focus of this study is on corporate characteristics (e.g...
This study focuses on immigration news as driver of anti-immigrant party support. Predicting the poll results of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), we distinguish between (a) general immigration news, news in which immigration is linked to (b) crime, (c) terrorism, or (d) the economy, and (e) immigration news in which the Freedom Party is mentioned exp...
This article examines the overtime variation in content and style of European Parliament election campaign posters in the Netherlands and Italy. We put forward several hypotheses that tap the professionalization of political communication against the backdrop of politicization of EU affairs. Our sample comprises 333 posters for a total of 59 partie...
This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influe...
This chapter discusses the relevance of the protest agenda; it is an indicator of what active segments of the public care about. The literature about the agenda-impact of protest is briefly reviewed, there are few systematic and comparative studies. Almost all protests have as an aim to increase political attention to the underlying issue. But stud...
This chapter adds to the growing literature on the Europeanization of national parliaments by looking at how and to what extent members of parliament (MPs) use parliamentary questions (PQs) on EU-related affairs. Relying on a comparison of three EU member states (France, Spain, and the Netherlands) and Switzerland, we analyze the Europeanization of...
Information distributed via the news media is acknowledged as a potential source of negative beliefs about, and biased behaviors toward, older workers. Focusing on the Netherlands, the current study explains age discrimination claims filed by older workers by investigating the impact of visibility and media stereotypes of older workers in the news...
This study investigates how Tichenor's hypothesized "knowledge gap" is affected differently by different modalities of news media. Measuring the acquisition of new surveillance facts in subsequent survey waves, we modeled how strongly people's level of knowledge grew over time and how this growth was affected by news consumption. Results show that...
This chapter on the framing perspective in relation to social movements is divided into two overlapping sections. The first situates the framing perspective on movements historically and theoretically; the second elaborates the perspective's evolving conceptual architecture.
News media ideally help citizens to achieve a better political understanding. Political sophistication, accordingly, is a central concept in the media effects literature, but its operationalizations rarely align well with its theoretical definition. The current paper introduces the approach of cognitive mapping to measure how sophisticated citizens...
By means of a large-scale manual content analysis of Dutch economic news coverage in 2015 (n = 4251 articles), we compare the use of “every day” sources by online and offline outlets. The use of those sources is argued to increase news consumers’ attentiveness to the news item. We investigate whether online outlets use the “ordinary citizen” less f...
This article investigates the interactions among parliamentary questions, newspaper coverage on the economic crisis, and consumer confidence. It focuses on France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands for the period 2005–2016. Based on insights from political agenda-setting and media effects research, we expect multidirectional relationships to be p...
Studies of the news coverage of European Union (EU) affairs have not yet paid much attention to coverage of the negotiations leading to EU legislative acts. This article investigates the factors that influence the attention national newspapers devote to these acts. We hypothesize that the decisions made by journalists and editors to pay attention t...
This study examines the extent to which politicians' visibility in traditional news coverage explains individual politicians' visibility on social media, and vice versa. We also explore whether these relationships depend on commonly identified characteristics of individual politicians. We collected data for all elected candidates from the 2012 Dutc...
This study investigates the causes of fluctuations in public concern about immigration and contends that issues emphasized in media coverage explain these fluctuations. Drawing on agenda-setting research and theories about issue attributes, it is argued that media emphasis on aspects of immigration that are likely to be unobtrusive but with potenti...
This study focuses on the implicit framing of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the interplay between the news media, organizational public relations (PR), and the public. The aim of the study is to investigate the multidirectional causal relationships between these three domains in terms of the use of implicit frames. An automated content a...
This study develops a model that contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between economic motivations and anti-Muslim attitudes by analyzing the underexplored role of news consumption. Using a large-scale Dutch panel dataset (n = 2694), we test a structural equation model theoretically grounded in group conflict theory, in whic...
Research investigating the drivers of consumers’ engagement with brands on social media is proliferating. However, little is known about how advertising outside social media drives engagement with brands on social media. This study aims to explore the relation between advertising spend in different offline media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, o...
Previous research has found mixed evidence for the effectiveness of negative campaigning. Therefore, scholars have recently turned their attention to the question whether there are different dimensions of negativity. The present study contributes both empirically and methodologically to this debate by investigating the effects of three German chanc...
In media effects research a fundamental choice is often made between (field) experiments or observational studies that rely on survey data in combination with data about the information environment or media coverage. Such studies linking survey data and media content data are often dubbed “linkage studies.” On the one hand, such designs are the sta...
Within the broader debate about media and politics, a remarkable observation is that journalists and politicians evaluate the size of the political influence of the media fundamentally differently. While politicians tend to emphasize the strong influence of media over their work, journalists tend to downplay this impact. This chapter discusses and...
Recent literature on discursive opportunities shows broad consensus on the importance of media communication in determining the success of minority mobilization. However, the impact of media discourse on formal forms of political participation is less clear. This article examines to what extent, if any, media coverage on immigrant minorities shapes...
Journalists use news factors to construct newsworthy stories. This study investigates whether different types of news outlets emphasize different news factors. Using a large-scale manual content analysis (n = 6489), we examine the presence of seven news factors in economic news across four different outlets types (i.e. popular, quality, regional, a...
In this chapter, we focus on the idea that national electoral campaigns – and specifically political advertising strategies – differ according to the length of European Union (EU) membership along with other country characteristics. One of the EU’s main paradigms is to balance socio-economic disparities between member states. All other things equal...
In this entry, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of comparative research. We outline the major obstacles in terms of building a comparative theoretical framework, collecting good-quality data, and analyzing those data, and we also explicate the advantages and research questions that can be addressed when taking a comparative approach. Add...
Issue ownership is increasingly used to explain voters’ electoral choices. Various studies show that when voters consider a party to be better able to handle specific issues, this positively affects their party preference. However, a number of scholars have raised concerns about the confoundedness of competence issue ownership and party preferences...
Following the news is generally understood to be crucial for democracy as it allows citizens to politically participate in an informed manner; yet, one may wonder about the unintended side effects it has for the mental well-being of citizens. With news focusing on the negative and worrisome events in the world, framing that evokes a sense of powerl...
Social media has slowly become ubiquitous in the workplace; however, the use of these technologies has been associated with both positive and negative consequences. Using the JD-R model, this study examines these positive and negative consequences of the public social media use for work. Survey data of 421 employees is used to explore the relations...
In the past decade, European governments have implemented activating policy reforms to maximize older workers’ employment and employability, representing a paradigmatic change in approaches to work and retirement. This study isolates the factors that explain the relative success and failure of competitive frames that are either in favor of or again...
Using a sample of over 5300 tweets from top global brands, this study investigated how different types of users can influence brand content diffusion via retweets. Twitter users who influenced followers to retweet brand content were categorized as (1) influentials, because of their above average ability to influence others to retweet their tweets (...
This study investigates the interdependent relationships between the stock market and economic news in the U.S. context. 2,440 economic tweets from Reuters and Bloomberg published in September 2015 were analyzed within short-term intervals (5 minutes, 20 minutes, and 1 hour) as well as 50 influential Bloomberg market coverage stories distributed vi...
This study applies agenda setting theory to understand how firms’ financial performance is affected by both the news media and the public agenda. Using content and time-series analysis for the data of five Dutch firms (period 2009−2013), we demonstrate that media attention (newspaper coverage) and public attention (GoogleTrends search) for a firm a...
This article investigates whether agenda-setting relations between newspapers and political parties are influenced by political parallelism. Our case is the Netherlands, a country characterized by high levels of journalistic professionalization and independent media. We focus on newspaper coverage and oral parliamentary questions and use time serie...
Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between...
This research introduces a methodological framework for a valid and reliable analysis of both media and interpretation frames. It responds to recent calls in literature (1) to acknowledge the social-cultural context and power relations underlying framing; (2) to consider frames as a cluster of frame-elements and (3) to identify interpretation frame...
This study investigates the interrelation of implicit frames in press releases by the two largest German banks (Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank) and the German financial media from 2007 until 2013. Findings suggest that an increase in the salience of certain frames in press releases by German banks resulted in a decrease of that same frame in the financ...
This paper studies how stakeholder relationships change when an organization undergoes a crisis as compared to routine circumstances. During crises, the stakeholder relationships are under pressure, and therewith the organization’s reputation and the crisis intensity. This paper’s purpose is to investigate how, during a crisis, pressure from both i...
This study takes crisis coverage as the dependent variable. Focusing on the Netherlands, we investigate how print media framed the economic crisis (2007–2013) and to what extent temporal and outlet factors account for variation in the use of frames. Relying on an in-depth qualitative content analysis followed up by a quantitative analysis, five maj...
In the past years the Netherlands have witnessed turbulent debates on immigration and integration, characterized by high levels of negativity and containing a variety of different viewpoints, i.e., frames, of the issue. We use a 4 x 2 between subjects experiment to investigate, which responses four salient immigration frames elicit among Dutch citi...
This article examines the use of interactive features (i.e., discussion and participation features) on the Web sites of Dutch political parties during the 2010 local elections campaign and investigates whether a relationship exists between interactivity and election results. A manual content analysis of 2,135 party Web sites demonstrates that Web s...
The study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the...
Purpose –This study examines the negative consequences of work related social
media use, and the extent to which the presence of social media policies in
organization is able to mitigate these consequences.
Design/methodology/approach – Web-based survey data (N = 575) was analysed
using structural equation modelling to test the indirect effect of s...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between interactive and personal campaigning on social media and political involvement, and the mechanisms that explain the effects. Specifically, this study examines whether personal and interactive communication on Twitter increases political involvement among citizens throug...
Older employees face a severe employability problem, partly because of dominant stereotypes about them. This study investigates stereotypes of older employees in corporate and news media. Drawing on the Stereotype Content Model, we content analysed newspaper coverage and corporate media of 50 large-scale Dutch organisations, published between 2006...