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Of Horses Races and Hard News: How Media and Political Systems Shape the News We Use
Susan Banducci & Chris Hanretty
Information Environment
• Information alters – Collective outcomes
• Information moderates – Opinion change
• Information mediates – Competition à
[information] à turnout
• Information environment influences individual levels of knowledge and awareness
• What influences the supply of politically relevant information in the environment?
• Information Environments. – Information environment
varies across electoral contexts (time/unit variant)
– Electorally relevant information driven by party competition, political communication systems?
– This last question is largely unexamined.
Citizens in Information Environments
Electoral System
Information Environment
Citizen Media System
Party System
Approaches:
• Media Regulator Framework • Political Supply
• Media Regulator Framework – Concentration of ownership, public broadcasting
• Political Supply – Competition, polarisarion ß electoral system, party system
– News = media system factors (including the market) + political factors
Expectations
• Motivated by consideration of the costs of producing news, capturing audiences (i.e. what is of interest)
• Competition in Market – Is news like a car? More competition, better product?
• Media System (hallin and mancini) – Capture and news values
• Political system – Competitive & Polarisation
• Audience demand – more educated/more interested
Expectations
News Content Data - European Election Study 1999, 2004 and 2009
• 1999, 2004 and 2009 European Elections Media Content Analysis & Voter Surveys
• 3 Newspapers (frontpage), 3 weeks prior to election
• Information (salience, actors, tone) indicators aggregated by country
• 67 second order elections
Data Linkages/measurement
• News – Soft news (topics) – Horse race news (polls,
winners, losers)
• Unit of Analysis – Story or broadcast/newspaper? – Story or outlet?
• The total N (5375) represents outletdays; the total number of stories analysed is of course much greater.
• Story level • Outlet level • Media System*
– e.g. MPP – measured with voter survey
• Political System – Electoral/party system
Summary Results
Soft News Horse race News
PSB *(-) *(+)
Broadsheet/Tabloid Newspapers * (+) Tabloid*(-)
Professionalism
Parallelism
Market Size *(+)
Market Competition/HHI *(-)
Closeness *(+)
ENP/Polarisation ENEP*(-) Pol*(+)
Audience Interest*(-)/Ed*(+) Interest*(-)
Conclusions
• Political Supply or Media Markets? – Political factors
important – Market competition
imo – Type of news matters: – Horse race – political
supply – Soft news – also
political factors
• Not much impact of media systems.
• Limited impact of media markets.
Schuck et al 2010. Party contestation and Europe on the news agenda: The 2009 European Parliamentary Elections Electoral Studies
Party Contestation and Europe in the News
Attributing responsibility for policy performance:
Economic stories – % mentioning either positive or negative effect of government on performance
010
2030
40
mea
n of
eco
ngov
_pne
ff_fu
ll
0 1 2 3
High Clarity
Low Clarity
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