The Role of Journalistic Norms and Political Context

As argued by both Wolfsfeld and Boydstun, analyzing the production of political news requires theories that take into account the interaction between the political context and the functioning of the modern mass media.Footnote ¹⁸ A first step is to recognize that professional journalistic norms may sometimes contradict each other when it comes to coverage of political actors. The Western tradition of neutral informational journalismFootnote ¹⁹ includes the concept of the media as watchdog.Footnote ²⁰ Empirical studies indicate that such a norm affects news coverage; they find, for instance, that the media have a clear negativity bias and focus disproportionately on societal problems or failures.Footnote ²¹ In this context, the news value of elite status clearly implies responsibility, as political actors are considered important to the extent that they can be blamed for societal problems. Hence, the watchdog norm makes actors in office more newsworthy, but at the same time the media actively challenge (and not only reflect) political power.

Another central norm is political balance. Modern news media should present a ‘neutral’ and balanced picture of reality, and avoid political biases that could question the media’s independence from political power. Exactly what political balance implies is debated.Footnote ²² However, one clear implication is that the media should cover opposition as well as the government, as the relevance of political actors is gauged from the perspective of political conflicts more than from the perspective of societal problems.

The next step, then, is to consider how different aspects of political context affect the application of the two norms, thereby influencing who appears in the news. Our point of departure is that the watchdog norm, together with news values that encourage the ‘reflection of power’, generate a focus on the incumbent in media coverage of political actors. Political news is dominated by societal problems, and the news comes to both reflect and challenge political power when covering these problems. The expected outcome in terms of media prominence is spelled out in our baseline hypothesis:

This hypothesis is perfectly in line with the results of the existing literature. However, we are looking to expand this finding by explaining variation in incumbents’ media prominence. First, we look at the difference between non-election and election times. Outside election campaigns, the political dynamic centers on the many societal problems that surface in news coverage. The opposition will often use news stories about societal problems to attack the government. Since it is not in office, the opposition can react to the news stories that it finds particularly attractive, for instance, news that directly questions government competence or attracts a great deal of attention.Footnote ²³ Governments find themselves in a much less flexible situation. When the media or political opponents raise questions about societal problems, the government has to respond, whether or not it actually has a chance to do something about the problems.

During election campaigns, the political contexts change. Part of a campaign is of course about how the government has performed, which still leads to an incumbency focus. However, electoral campaigns also revolve around what the future government will do, as incumbents and challengers debate which issues need to be addressed and which solutions need to be applied. This means the media will focus on the different contenders’ platforms and ideas.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, elections are contests, during which the norm of objectivity demands more balance between the media visibility of incumbents and challengers. Overall, during campaigns, political actors are considered in the context of their role in party competition and less in light of policy responsibility. The implication of this argument is summarized in the following hypothesis:

Pushing this argument further, the nature and level of conflict between government and opposition not only differs between election and non-election times. Between elections, different policy issues attract varying amounts of political attention. As argued above, the incumbency bonus is partly the result of the opposition’s greater flexibility, since it can choose not to react to news stories if it finds no advantage in doing so.Footnote ²⁵ Yet incumbents are obliged to respond, as they hold policy responsibility regardless of issue saliency. By contrast, when attention to an issue is high in the media, opposition parties have an incentive to join the media debate; otherwise they are unable to communicate their engagement in (and positions on) salient issues.

For journalists, issues that deal with government actors will be considered newsworthy even when they lack the conflict between political competitors that could sustain further coverage. However, when issues become politically salient, conflict and party competition supplement elite status and power as key news values. Consequently, the norm of balance increases its relevance in news coverage, in the same way it does during election campaigns. Overall, then, the size of the incumbency bonus is expected to vary with the degree of attention paid to issues in the media:

The argument underlying a general incumbency bonus is that incumbents dominate media coverage due to their policy relevance. Therefore, the incumbency bonus should vary according to government strength. A majority government, which does not depend on the support of opposition parties to pass legislation, should produce the highest incumbency bonus.Footnote ²⁶ Minority governments that need to negotiate support with one or several opposition parties will, however, share a part of the incumbency bonus with the parties that support the government. This implies that the news picks up on the details of how policy responsibility is shared in a political system. Concentration of power makes it easier to identify and communicate who is responsible.Footnote ²⁷ The implication of these mechanisms is summarized in the following hypothesis:

Finally, the argument on the causes of variation in the incumbency bonus has implications for its effect on electoral support. The existing literature has also paid attention to support in opinion polls, but from the opposite perspective. Hopmann, de Vreese and Albaek’s study of Danish election campaigns found that the stronger the incumbent’s standing in the polls, the higher the incumbency bonus.Footnote ²⁸ This is a logical consequence of mass media focus on who will form the next government.

Outside election campaigns, however, a reverse relationship should be expected. Most of the time, the next election is far away, making it unlikely that changes in poll standings have substantial effects on the balance in media coverage between incumbents and challengers. Instead, incumbent coverage is characterized by societal problems, negativity and blame, which, in the aggregate, will damage their electoral support. In other words, we question the assumption behind the concept of an incumbency ‘bonus’: that incumbents profit from a higher media prominence. Rather, if it is correct that incumbents’ dominance in the media reflects the burden of being in government, then media prominence should be an electoral liability. This would also shed light on the well-documented but underexplored ‘cost of ruling’ finding in the voting literature, which holds that over time governments tend to lose electoral support.Footnote ²⁹ The implication of this argument is summarized in our final hypothesis:

Measuring the Incumbency Bonus

The first step in measuring the dependent variable, Incumbency Bonus, is to operationalize the notion of opposition and government in the context of the Danish multiparty system. Danish politics is organized around a bloc of left-wing and a bloc of right-wing parties. The left-wing bloc consists of the Social Democrats, the Socialist People’s Party and more extreme left-wing parties. Typically, the Social Liberals have also supported the left-wing bloc, although in certain periods, it supported the right-wing bloc. The latter was the case, for instance, during the center-right government from 1982 to 1993. The right-wing bloc consists of the Liberals and the Conservatives and more radical right-wing parties. The two small center parties, the Centre Democrats and Christian People’s Party, have also typically supported the right-wing bloc. The Danish tradition for minority governments implies that not all parties from a bloc actually take part in the government. However, all parties clearly belong to a bloc when it comes to forming a government, and even the center parties that have sometimes changed blocs always indicate before an election which bloc they will support.Footnote ³⁶

In the following, we mainly compare the media prominence of the incumbent parties with that of the parties that constitute the most likely alternative government.Footnote ³⁷ However, we also try out an alternative operationalization in which parties that support the government (the government’s parliamentary basis) also count as incumbents, and in which the entire bloc of opposition parties is included in the comparison group.Footnote ³⁸ It should be noted that there is no strong separation between executive and legislative power in the Danish context. This implies that the government parties are mainly prominent in the media as ministers. MPs from the government parties are normally very loyal to the cabinet and hardly ever ask the ministers critical questions in parliament. Danish politics is a struggle between ministers and the opposition parties.

To determine the incumbency bonus, we first calculated the media prominence of both incumbent and opposition actors.Footnote ³⁹ If, for instance, the incumbents have a score of 75 per cent, this means that a minimum of one government actor is present in three out of four news features on a given issue topic in a given week. The incumbency bonus was then calculated by simply subtracting the media prominence of opposition actors from the prominence of government actors.

Table 1 provides an overview of the incumbency bonus for each Danish government in the period. In line with Hypothesis 1, the table documents a clear media dominance for incumbent actors in all cabinets. However, it also provides support for the general contention of this article: that the size of the bonus varies. Note that the two different measures of the incumbency bonus produce very similar results. In the rest of the article, we use the first operationalization, which compares the parties in government with the government alternative, as this is the most conventional definition of incumbency.

Table 1

The Incumbency Bonus across Governments, 1984–2003

Note: Incumbency bonus is measured as the difference between the media prominence of governing parties and the alternative government. The alternative operationalization measures the bonus as the difference between the media prominence of the governing bloc (governing and support parties) and that of the opposition bloc (alternative government and alternative government support parties).

Modeling Approach and Measures of Explanatory Variables

The ambition to explain variation in incumbents’ media prominence implies that we need a multivariate test in which the effects of all explanatory variables are modeled simultaneously. Since our dataset includes several layers (issues and weeks) that may be considered groups or clusters of data, we estimate a set of multilevel models. More particularly, the multilevel analysis models the media prominence of both incumbent and opposition parties, observed per week per issue. We measure the media prominence of incumbent and opposition parties separately because it makes it possible to get a more detailed examination of changes in the incumbency bonus. This way we can separate out, for instance, whether a drop in the incumbency bonus indicates that the incumbent receives less attention, that the opposition receives more attention or both. Given our twenty-seven policy issues, this means that the dataset consists of twenty-seven categories repeated over 1,059 weeks for both incumbents and challengers (27×1,059×2=57,186). As explained earlier, however, we only estimate relationships for the units (weeks×issue categories) in which a minimum of one political actor appears in the news. Thus the number of relevant cases is reduced to 25,274.Footnote ⁴⁰

Table 2 provides descriptive information of the variables in the statistical models. A dummy variable, Incumbents, distinguishes between government/incumbents (coded 1) and alternative government/challengers (coded 0). The variable Election Campaign simply denotes the number of weeks in the campaign (note that an election campaign in Denmark usually lasts about three weeks). News Saliency is operationalized as the count of news features for each unit, which means for each issue category per week. Parliamentary Strength is measured as the share of seats in parliament of the government and alternative government parties. To test Hypotheses 2, 3 and 4, the latter three variables are interacted with the incumbent dummy variable. To examine Hypothesis 5, we also include weekly measures of the Poll Standing of incumbent and challenger parties.Footnote ⁴¹ Finally, government color (Right of Center Government) was included as a control variable.

Table 2

Descriptives of Variables in the Empirical Models

Media Prominence and Electoral Support

As noted above, during election campaigns, the incumbency bonus has been shown to increase with increasing incumbent strength in opinion polls.Footnote ⁴³ However, as summarized in Hypothesis 5, our expectation is that outside election campaigns, incumbent support in opinion polls decreases with increases in media prominence. This expectation follows from the argument that outside election campaigns, the watchdog norm and the negativity bias of the media imply a strong focus on the government’s responsibility for, and (lack of) responses to, societal problems and failures.

A first step in evaluating this idea is to document the negativity bias in the media and the critical coverage of government actors. To do this, we draw on a sample of radio news items from the year 2003, which have been further content coded. In addition to the measure of actor prominence used above, the sample includes a tone coding based on whether the news item is bad, neutral or good from the incumbent’s point of view, as well as a coding of whether the government is explicitly criticized in the news.Footnote ⁴⁴

Based on this content coding, Table 5 clearly shows that considerably more news items are bad than good from the government’s point of view (49 per cent vs. 22 per cent). This is even the case when government actors appear in the news, though the dominance of bad versus good news is less pronounced compared to when no government actor is present (50 per cent vs. 22 per cent, compared to 44 per cent vs. 24 per cent). Furthermore, Table 6 shows that in 55 per cent of the negative news features in which incumbents appear, the government is explicitly subject to blame and criticism.Footnote ⁴⁵ When government actors do not appear, the corresponding share of criticism is only 17 per cent. Thus incumbents’ media prominence is clearly associated with more government criticism.

Table 5

News Tone in Sample of Radio News Features from 2003 (N=1,980)

Table 6

Government Criticism in Sample of Negative Radio News Features from 2003 (N=972)

Having established that news is generally bad for the government, and that government actors in the news are associated with government criticism, the next step is to see whether government actors’ prominence in the media is associated with declining government support in opinion polls (Hypothesis 5). To examine this question, we perform a set of Granger causality tests of the relationship between opinion polls and media prominence. As expressed by Granger, the logic of this approach is that: ‘[…] Y_t is causing X_t if we are better able to predict X_t using all available information than if the information apart from Y_t had been used’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Including both one- and two-week lags in the model, Table 7 provides evidence of one-sided causality going from media prominence to standing in polls. Furthermore, the effect is negative, which supports the idea that media prominence may be a double-edged sword, but only for incumbent parties (see Model 1 in Table 7) and not for the opposition (see Model 3 in Table 7). In combination with the results of the more detailed coding shown in Tables 5 and 6, this Granger causality-inspired analysis challenges the idea that media dominance is a bonus, instead offering an integrated perspective of the causes and consequences of the incumbency bonus: If what gets a party in the news is a combination of policy responsibility and the media’s critical coverage of societal problems, then media visibility is likely to come at the expense of electoral support.Footnote ⁴⁷

Table 7

Granger Causality-Based Multilevel Models of the Relationship between Media Prominence and Poll Standing (Hypothesis 5)

Note: Standard errors in parentheses *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001.

Robustness of Results

We have explored the robustness of the main findings in several ways. First, we re-ran the analyses reported in Table 3 after replacing the measure of incumbents with a measure that only counts ministers as incumbents (excluding MPs and members of the European Parliament (EP) from governing parties). This shows essentially the same results as already reported.Footnote ⁴⁸

Secondly, we re-estimated the models presented in Table 3 by excluding the twenty-seven issues one at a time. This jackknife analysis provides information about the sensitivity of the conclusions to the impact of potential issue outliers. It turns out, however, that excluding issues had no important effect on the results reported above. We find an incumbency bonus (of varying strength) in all jackknife analyses.

Thirdly, as van Aelst and de Swert also include EP and local elections, we added these election weeks both separately and in combination with national elections.Footnote ⁴⁹ On their own, EP and local elections were not statistically significant and had no substantial effect on the other results. From this, we conclude that non-national elections are considered quite differently from a media perspective than national elections (results of all robustness checks are available upon request).

Finally, we utilize the opportunities that the Danish minority governments offer to test how sensitive the media coverage is to the political context. Recall that in systems with frequent minority governments, some of the media dominance that governments in majority systems enjoy could, potentially, rub off on opposition parties that support the government. Furthermore, support parties are interesting from a media perspective because they hold blackmail potential vis-à-vis the government. When a minority government proposes new policies, there is often considerable media interest in how support parties respond. This feature of minority rule adds a special dynamic of interest for the media: a potential conflict within the government bloc. In sum, the political context of minority rule means that some non-government parties are deemed more newsworthy than others because they exert more policy influence and hold more policy responsibility.

To investigate this difference, we ran the same analyses as those reported in table 3 above, replacing the variable Incumbents with an Incumbent Support dummy variable that separates government support parties (coded 1) from parties that support the government alternative (coded 0). The central result is that parties that support the government do have more news coverage than opposition parties that would have supported the alternative government – also when controlling for their parliamentary strength (results are not shown but are available from the authors upon request). We interpret this finding as further evidence of how political context variables matter when explaining the media prominence of political actors.