Communicating political positions on European issues – a comparison of parties and newspapers in seven countriesi

Leidecker-Sandmann, Melanie; Eugster, Beatrice (2020). Communicating political positions on European issues – a comparison of parties and newspapers in seven countriesi. Political Studies Review, 20(1), pp. 62-82. Wiley 10.1177/1478929920952001

Preview	Text Leidecker_Eugster_2020_ Communicating political positions on European issues.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works (CC-BY-NC-ND). Download (262kB) | Preview
	Text 1478929920952001.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (370kB)

This article starts from the observation that most voters know relatively little about positions and plans of political parties, especially when European Union politics is concerned. One reason for this could be that the main sources for political information, party communication and mass media coverage, provide voters only little concrete information about positions and plans of political parties. We ask how concretely, respectively vaguely, political parties and mass media communicate political positions prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of all European Union–related press releases from 46 national political parties and of all European Union–related articles of 14 national quality newspapers from 7 European countries 12 weeks before the 2014 European Parliament elections. Our analysis shows that press releases as well as media coverage contain more concrete political positions on European Union issues than vague political statements. Other than expected, newspaper coverage provided the public with less concrete information than political actors did. Nevertheless, countries vary with regard to the extent to which party communication or newspaper coverage contain vague statements. We cannot find empirical support that the communication of concrete political positions depends on a party’s “extremity” of issue position or on the type of issue.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

294 since deposited on 03 Nov 2020
45 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item