Gunnar Thesen

Coping With Corporatism in Decline and the Revival of Parliament Interest Group Lobbyism in Denmark and Norway, 1980–2005

Denmark and Norway have experienced significant political changes during the past three decades, changes that affect the constraints and opportunities organized interests are facing. Corporatist representation in the policy-making process has declined, and changes in executive-legislative relations have increased the power of parliaments. Organized interests are expected to adapt to these changing circumstances to maintain their political influence. This article shows how Danish and Norwegian interest groups have coped with the decline of corporatism and the revival of parliaments. Representation in corporatist policy-making committees and lobbying toward civil servants in government ministries have been supplemented and in some cases substituted by political lobbyism directed toward elected representatives in the parliament and the government. The analysis is based on panel data from several surveys carried out among nationwide interest groups in Denmark and Norway.

The Incumbency Bonus Revisited: Causes and Consequences of Media Dominance

The literature on political actors’ media appearances has repeatedly documented the so-called incumbency bonus (that parties and politicians in government have more media coverage than those in the opposition). This bias is normally attributed to news criteria that reflect political power, such as relevance and the elite status of actors. Supplementing existing perspectives, this study puts forward a new explanation of the incumbency bonus. The article argues that variations in the media dominance of incumbents are the result of the interplay between journalistic norms and political context. Outside election campaigns, political news is driven by the ‘watch dog’ norm. Thus the media focus on societal problems, which produces a critical emphasis on incumbent actors. But when party competition intensifies, either during campaigns or when issues become salient, the norm of objective and impartial journalism results in a more balanced coverage where challengers increase their presence. The argument receives support through multivariate models of incumbent and challenger appearances in Danish radio news broadcasts over a twenty-year period. Finally, in terms of democratic implications, the importance of the watchdog norm challenges the assumption that the incumbency bonus constitutes an electoral asset. Since media dominance is closely related to government responsibility for all kinds of problems, incumbent support is found to dwindle with increased media appearances.

Political Agenda Setting as Mediatized Politics? Media–Politics Interactions from a Party and Issue Competition Perspective

The paper puts forward, and empirically explores, claims on how the literature on political agenda setting could inform the concept of mediatized politics. It uses as a starting point the lack of empirical research within mediatization studies, arguing that the field of political agenda setting offers important supplements through systematic investigations of the media’s role in promoting social problems on the political agenda. However, this does not imply a straightforward merging of the two traditions. Instead, I discuss how agenda-setting perspectives offer a more active and visible role for political actors and political logics in the media–politics relationship, presenting analyses that find media influence on political issue attention to be conditioned by policy responsibility and the competition between opposition and government. Furthermore, the paper takes issue with the zero-sum game interpretation of the media–politics relationship, where mediatization necessarily implies decreasing political influence. Future research, on both mediatization and agenda setting, need to address how the media (re)distributes power between different actors or institutions in politics. As a first step toward this goal, I show that opposition parties (in some respects) are more mediatized than government but that this constitutes an opposition strength in party competition.

Mediatization and Political Agenda-Setting: Changing Issue Priorities?

Agenda-setting is one of the most influential theories on the media’s political influence (Graber, 2005). While often focusing on the media’s impact on public opinion, another equally important facet of agenda-setting theory has the media’s influence over the agendas of political actors and policy makers as its central object of investigation. Scholars use the term “political agenda-setting” and in some instances “agenda-building” to refer to the transfer of media priorities to political priorities. Despite the growing popularity and importance of political agenda-setting research, it has seldom been conceptualized as part of or related to the mediatization of politics.

Priming, Issue Ownership, and Party Support: The Electoral Gains of an Issue-Friendly Media Agenda

Issue ownership theory posits a positive relationship between electoral support and public attention to issues that a party “owns.” We investigate this key prediction of the issue ownership theory in a dynamic analysis of 20 years of party support and media coverage across multiple parties and issues. The results provide support for the basic electoral implication of issue ownership theory, showing that increased media attention to owned issues increases support for the issue owners. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the effect of the ownership mechanism materializes differently for opposition and government parties. Opposition parties benefit from media attention to owned issues without losing ground when news concentrates on issues owned by government parties, while government parties, always struggling with the electoral cost of ruling, lose votes when news about opposition-owned issues increases without gaining support when the media agenda is “issue-friendly.”

Win Some, Lose None? Support Parties at the Polls and in Political Agenda-Setting

Support parties play a crucial, but under-exposed, role under minority rule. They secure the government’s place in office and exercise policy influence through legislative coalitions. This article examines whether support parties are unfettered by the liabilities of policy responsibility. Incumbents struggle with the cost of ruling in elections and in day-to-day party and issue competition. Support parties, lacking the formal responsibility of office, could arguably escape the negative consequences of policy influence. Two studies illustrate this mechanism. First, I find that Scandinavian support parties that exercise policy influence through participation in budget coalitions avoid electoral losses. However, unlike opposition parties from the government bloc that do not participate in budget coalitions, support parties are unable to increase their vote share. Second, by looking more closely at one support party and analysing its agenda-setting behaviour in response to media attention, I find that support parties, unlike incumbents and like opposition parties, are able to politicise ‘winning issues’ from the news. Despite occasional trade-offs due to their proximity to power, support parties are favourably positioned in party competition.

An Intervening Intermediary: Making Political Sense of Media Influence

This theoretical chapter puts political actors’ news use into a broader political science context. Despite increasing acknowledgement of the media as a political institution and actor, media influence on politics should be distinguished from other types of influence typically studied by political scientists. Media influence is not about what the media “gets”, but rather about how news intervene in the political processes that determine the distribution of power between other political actors and institutions. We call this the second layer of media’s political influence, and argue that studies of media and politics should to a larger extent use theories about the strategies and motives of political actors as a starting point in order to contribute to the explanation of who gets what, when, and how.

News Tone and the Government in the News: When and Why Do Government Actors Appear in the News?

This chapter focuses on the political tone of news coverage. Three issues are examined. First, we find that news is always more negative than positive from the point of view of the government, although the degree of negativity varies across issues. Second, results show that incumbents appear more often in the news when the tone of the coverage is positive, while opposition presence is linked to a substantially higher share of negative news. Finally, we explore the causal and temporal patterns between variations in news tone and government presence. The findings indicate that increased government presence in the news is a reaction to negative news, but show no signs that the government is able to make subsequent news coverage of an issue more favorable.