Christian Elmelund-Præstekær

Party media agenda-setting: how parties influence election news coverage

Political parties have substantial influence on which issues the news media cover during election campaigns, while the media have limited influence on party agendas. However, we know little about why some parties are more successful than others in passing the media’s gates and being covered on sponsored issues. On the basis of content analyses of election news coverage (812 news stories) and press releases published by political parties (N = 334) during the 2007 national election campaign in Denmark, we analyse which parties were successful in appearing in the news on issues on which they published press releases. Using Sartori’s notion of relevant parties, we conclude that the more relevant parties have more success, that there is a positive spillover effect from other parties’ press releases, but also a negative interaction effect between a party’s own and other parties’ press releases. The results are discussed with respect to their generalizability and arising challenges for future research.

Beyond American negativity: toward a general understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning

This article supplements and further develops the almost exclusively American literature on the determinants of negative campaigning by analyzing the tone of the Danish parties’ election campaigns. It concludes that proximity to governmental power matters, as oppositional parties are more negative than incumbents. This is comparable to the American experiences. The prospect of electoral failure, however, does not affect the tone the same way as poor poll standings do in the US. Moreover, it is suggested that future studies of negativity might consider how different party organizations affect the campaign tone; at least this study finds indications that parties with large proportions of party identifiers are slightly more negative than other parties. Finally, it is found that parties campaign differently in different channels of communication; that is, they are generally more negative in channels that allow direct interaction among politicians. This finding poses the question whether some channels are better empirical sources for studies of negativity than others, which is addressed in the closing section of the article.

An Anatomy of Media Hypes: Developing a Model for the Dynamics and Structure of Intense Media Coverage of Single Issues

■Media hypes are a well known phenomenon. They occur on a regular basis and attract much media attention, but there is very little knowledge about them. This article supplements Vastermans analysis of the phenomenon and presents new empirical evidence. Through a case study of five Danish media hypes occurring between 2000 and 2005, the article shows that not every event has the potential to trigger a media hype: it must, of course, satisfy the general news values, but should also contain some violation of norms, be suitable for public debate and, finally, it must be possible for the media to cover the event from a variety of perspectives. Concerning the structure and dynamics of the media hype, the article concludes that media hypes begin with a trigger event, they last approximately three weeks and come in several, usually three, waves of decreasing intensity. ■

Does Mediatization Change MP-Media Interaction and MP Attitudes toward the Media? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of Danish MPs

Mass media have become more important in political communication in western democracies in recent decades. Parliamentarians need to pay attention to the norms and demands of the media and conform to the ‘media logic’. Politicians allegedly lose communicative autonomy in their interaction with the media and the literature suggests that they regret this development. The consequences of this mediatization process are rarely studied empirically, however. Using two elite surveys this article studies Danish MPs’ interaction with and attitudes toward the media in 1980 and 2000. As expected, the evidence shows that MPs appear more often in the media in 2000 than in 1980, and that they have come to perceive the media as a more autonomous political actor. Contrary to expectations, MPs have not become more critical toward the media in general and they have become even more satisfied with the media coverage of their own activities as MPs. On the individual level, the increased satisfaction is correlated with media appearances which again correlate with seniority, position, and party affiliation. The evidence suggests that parliamentarians are not puppets of the media-at least some of them are in a position to take advantage of the mediatization of politics.

What's the Fuss About? The Interplay of Media Hypes and Politics

Media hypes on social problems occur on a regular basis and they seem to generate a lot of political activity. This article asks the question whether media hypes have any influence on public policies central issue of the hype—and if any, what kind of influence? Five media hypes on the same subject area (the care for and spending on the elderly) are analyzed.Their immediate influence on policy making is traced, and although the media often is assumed to exercise real political power through media hypes, no—or only few—traces of such direct political influence is found. Instead media hypes are used strategically by politicians to forward their ongoing work and their positions in the public debate, thus if the media gains political influence because of media hypes one can only see this influence as diffuse and not directly linked to the media hypes themselves.

NEGATIVE CAMPAIGNING IN A MULTIPARTY SYSTEM

The article has a dual purpose: First, it examines the extent of negative campaigning in a parliamentarian multiparty setting. Second, it attempts to move the understanding of the dynamics of negative campaigning beyond the American setting by exposing a Danish case to the American models, assumptions and theories of negativity. The data indicate that bad poll standings and fierce competition correlate positively with a higher degree of negativity in Denmark, like America. Likewise, parties and candidates seem to be reluctant to initiate negative campaigning. In addition, the exploration of the Danish case tentatively indicates that negativity in a multiparty system is aimed at a limited number of opponents structured according to coalition membership.

Policy or institution? The political choice of retrenchment strategy

The present study breaks new ground in the study of welfare reform by developing the theoretical argument that governments can choose between transparent policy retrenchment and less-transparent institutional retrenchment when pursuing welfare state contraction. Policy retrenchment is transparent because it reallocates substantial benefits and has direct and immediate consequences for welfare recipients. Institutional retrenchment is less transparent as it reallocates institutional authority and primarily has indirect long-term consequences. Owing to the difference in transparency and direct effects on the voter population, we theoretically propose that elected officials may choose strategically between policy and institutional retrenchment. Consistent with the theoretical argument, we demonstrate that policy retrenchment is more frequently used in times of economic hardship and on welfare issues protecting against risks that are imposed disproportionately on the lower social strata. Contrary to our expectation, however, left-leaning governments do not apply strategies of policy retrenchment more often than right-wing governments.

Issue Ownership as a Determinant of Negative Campaigning

Existing studies on the determinants of negative campaigning conclude that context matters as the degree of positive and negative campaigning vary according to factors such as proximity to election day, poll standing, incumbency status, and the size of the ‘war chest’. The present article discusses whether not only the context, but also the content of campaigns needs to be considered when analysing why and when political parties go negative. The article argues that parties enjoying ownership of campaign issues tend to employ a more positive rhetorical style than parties with less ownership. Using four Danish election campaigns as cases, this proposition is empirically supported: the degree of issue ownership is positively correlated with a positive campaign tone, controlling for a range of traditional contextual factors. The new content factor does not outperform the usual contextual suspects, but it adds nuance to the general understanding of the determinants of negativity.

The partisanship of systemic retrenchment: tax policy and welfare reform in Denmark 1975–2008

We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diffuse losses for larger groups in a distant future. Consequently, the electorate may accept or even desire tax cuts and associated initiatives to curb government income relative to retrenchment measures of services and benefits. Our empirical analysis supports such theoretical propositions. In an extensive comparative analysis of all tax laws adopted by four Danish governments, we find clear partisan differences. In an in-depth study of the tax policy of the latest right-wing government, we moreover empirically support the causality of the argument as the government did in fact try to curb specific taxes in order to constrain the spending side of the welfare state in an indirect manner.

What wins public support? Communicating or obfuscating welfare state retrenchment

Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to evaluate the impact of welfare state retrenchment on government popularity. We hypothesize that communicating retrenchment is a better strategy than obfuscating retrenchment measures. In addition, we hypothesize that the opposition’s choice between arguing against the retrenchment measure, or staying silent on the issue, affects the government’s popularity. Thus, the study presents a novel theoretical model of the popularity effects of welfare state retrenchment. In order to evaluate our propositions, we move beyond the standard measure in the literature and use monthly opinion polls to reduce the number of other factors that might affect government popularity. We demonstrate that governments can evade popular punishment by communication. They can even gain popularity if the opposition chooses not to attack. On the other hand, government popularity declines if the government obfuscates - and the decline is even larger if the opposition chooses to attack.