Stefaan Walgrave

New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the ‘anti‐globalization’ movement

Abstract Collective action and social movement protest has become commonplace in our ‘demonstration‐democracy’ and no longer surprises the media or the public. However, as will be shown, this was not the case with the recent anti‐globalization protests that attracted demonstrators from countries all over the world. The battles of Seattle, Washington, Prague and Genoa, with an unforeseen mixture of nationalities and movements, became world news. Interestingly, the new media seemed to play a crucial role in the organization of these global protests. This article maps this movement‐in‐progress via an analysis of the websites of anti‐globalization, or more specifically anti‐neo‐liberal globalization organizations. It examines the contribution of these sites to three different conditions that establish movement formation; collective identity; actual mobilization and a network of organizations. This ongoing, explorative research indicates signs of an integration of different organizations involved and attributes an important role to the Internet. However, whilst both our methodology and subject are evolving rapidly, conclusions, as our initial results show, must be tempered.

The Mass Media's Political Agenda-Setting Power: A Longitudinal Analysis of Media, Parliament, and Government in Belgium (1993 to 2000)

Do mass media determine or codetermine the political agenda? Available answers on this question are mixed and contradictory. Results vary in terms of the type of political agenda under scrutiny, the kind of media taken into account, and the type of issues covered. This article enhances knowledge of the medias political agenda-setting power by addressing each of these topics, drawing on extensive longitudinal measures of issue attentiveness in media, Parliament, and government in Belgium in the 1990s. Relying on time-series, cross-section analyses, the authors ascertain that although Belgium is characterized by a closed political system, the media do to some extent determine the agenda of Parliament and government. There is systematic variation in media effects, however. Newspapers exert more influence than does television, Parliament is somewhat more likely to follow media than government, and media effects are larger for certain issues (law and order, environment) than for others (foreign policy, economic issues).

The Making of the (Issues of the) Vlaams Blok

In Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, one of the strongest extreme right parties of Europe thrives: the Vlaams Blok (the Flemish Bloc). The basic question of this article is straightforward: Do the Flemish media contribute to the success of the Vlaams Blok by emphasizing the themes of the party? The theoretical argument is twofold: agenda setting by the media and issue ownership by parties. The issues the Vlaams Blok owns are determined using two sources: its electoral manifestoes and its electorates motivations to vote for the party. This leads to four issues: Flemish nationalism, immigrant topics, antipolitics issues, and crime-related themes. Using a vast media data set covering three newspapers and two TV stations and stretching over 10 years (1991-2000), we examine to what extent these issues were covered. The analysis shows that especially immigrant topics and crime receive extensive and growing media attention, and time series analysis shows that this rise parallels the electoral growth of the Vlaams Blok. The media could be considered co-responsible for the Vlaams Bloks upsurge.

Where Does Issue Ownership Come From? From the Party or from the Media? Issue-party Identifications in Belgium, 1991-2005

Although widely used in political science to tackle voting behavior and campaign strategy, the issue-ownership thesis remains untested when it comes to the origins of parties’ identification with specific issues. This article explores where issue ownership comes from and/or how it is maintained. The authors test two possible avenues of issue ownership: the party and the mass media. On one hand, parties’ own external communication may stress specific issues, claiming to be best placed to solve these issues. On the other hand, parties could be identified by the media with certain issues, leading to an implicit association between issue and party. The authors test both propositions, drawing on the case of Belgium, a small consociational democracy in Western Europe. Belgium is a good case to examine issue ownership, as its many parties are identified with many issues. Relying on extensive media data and party evidence, they find that issue ownership is related both to party communications and media coverage. This applies in particular to newer, challenging parties that are strongly identified with their core issues. In general, parties’ older communications are drivers of issue ownership; in contrast, recent media coverage contributes to issue ownership. The direction of the causal arrow remains unsure.

Voting Aid Applications and the Effect of Statement Selection

Voting Aid Applications (VAA) helping voters make their decision at the ballots have become more popular throughout Western Europe. They typically consist of a number of statements that are used to match voters with parties. Drawing on a large-scale simulation of 500,000 different configurations of 36 statements and on a random sample of Belgian voters, the paper shows that many of these combinations produce diverging information for the participants. The study establishes that the specific selection of statements has a considerable impact on the ‘voting advice’ that is produced: some configurations favour certain parties, other configurations benefit other parties.

Minimal or Massive? The Political Agenda-Setting Power of the Mass Media According to Different Methods

The debate on the media’s agenda-setting power is not settled yet. Most empirical agenda-setting studies using time-series analyses found that the media matter for the political agenda, but the size of the found media effects remains often modest. This nuanced view on media impact seems to contradict with the perceptions of politicians. Our comparative survey of members of parliament in four small parliamentary democracies—Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark—shows that they consider the mass media to be one of the key political agenda setters directly competing with the Prime Minister and the powerful political parties. This article further explores the inconsistency between “objective” and “subjective” findings.We develop six possible explanations for the contradicting findings produced by both methods and formulate concrete suggestions to improve both methods and diminish the gap between them.

When media matter for politics: partisan moderators of mass media’s agenda-setting influence on parliament in Belgium

In this study, we investigate which factors moderate the agenda-setting influence of the mass media on the Belgian parliament during the period 1993—2000. Based on elaborate codings of the media, parliamentary questions and interpellations, party manifestos, government agreements and ministerial meetings, we employ a multi-level time-series model. The results indicate that especially party characteristics (party size, incumbent or opposition party, issue ownership) and the government agenda influence the dependency of parliament on media coverage. Furthermore, we find an increase in the extent of media influence through time, suggesting an increasing presence of ‘media logic’ in the behaviour of Belgian MPs. Irrespective of all those contingent factors, the mass media determine the Belgian parliamentary agenda to a considerable degree.

Content matters: the dynamics of parliamentary questioning in Belgium and Denmark

Why do MPs devote attention to some issues while ignoring others? The question of the issue content of parliamentary activities has been neglected in previous research. The authors use longitudinal data on parliamentary questioning in Belgium and Denmark, two similar European democracies. The analyses show that the questioning behavior of MPs is structured according to clear patterns. Opposition parties ask more questions in general. MPs tend to focus on the issues the government parties have put forward as being important. Furthermore, MPs ask more questions about issues the media have paid attention to and about issues their party cares about and identifies with. In their questioning, opposition MPs are more strongly influenced by issue ownership and media coverage. The Belgian and Danish MPs follow largely the same pattern.

Policy with or without parties? A comparative analysis of policy priorities and policy change in Belgium, 1991 to 2000

Abstract This paper confronts two models of policy: the party model states that policy-making is an orderly process initiated by parties implementing their party programme and carrying out their electoral promises; the external pressure model contends that policy change is a non-orderly process but rather a disjoint process coming in large bursts that are difficult to predict. Drawing upon eight policy agendas in Belgium covering the period from 1991 to 2000 we put both models to the test. Policy measures are operationalized via the budget and legislation. We found that budgets are as good as disconnected from any other policy agenda in Belgium. Legislation and the evolving legislative attention for issues in Belgium can be traced back to some extent to parties and external pressure at the same time. In terms of static policy priorities, we found that the party model indicators, party programmes and government agreements, are fairly good predictors of the legislative attention an issue will receive during the governmental term. Regarding dynamic policy change from year to year, we found that the external pressure indicators – parliamentary pressure, media coverage and street protest – performed much better and were able to grasp some variance in issue emphasis in legislation.

Who is that (wo)man in the street? From the normalisation of protest to the normalisation

The time has long since passed that protests and demonstrations wereregarded as the possible beginning of violent revolutionary ferment. Venting dissatisfaction or making demands in the streets has become commonplace in our ‘demonstration-democracy’. In this article we examine whether this normalisation of street protest also means that more heterogeneous groups of people taketo the streets. Have citizens become potentially peaceful protesters or is protest politics still the domain of union militants, progressive intellectuals, and committed students? In answering these questions wewill use the three research methods most commonly used for studying collective action: population surveys, protest event-analysis and interviews with protesters at demonstrations.