A BSTRACT This article investigates the current state of press partisanship in the UK. Utilizing content analysis data from the 2005 General Election campaign, recent hypotheses about press dealignment are tested with quantitative methods. Partisan tendencies in reporting are measured in terms of coverage bias , statement bias , and agenda bias . As the governing party, Labour benefits from coverage bias in all papers, while the Liberal Democrats remain marginalized. It can be shown that increasingly ambiguous endorsements in broadsheet and tabloid press alike translate into a general absence of open support for political parties. At best, endorsed parties receive neutral treatment, with their opponents being harshly criticized. Partisan tendencies do, however, manifest themselves in other patterns of campaign coverage. Even weakly partisan papers engage in strategic behaviour, most notably by reinforcing the issue agendas of endorsed parties. With both the Independent and the Guardian lending strategic support to the Liberal Democrats, and the Murdoch press being largely non-committal, the analysis hints at an erosion of support for New Labour.
The principle that parties should make policy commitments during election campaigns and fulfil those commitments if elected is central to the idea of promissory representation. This study examines citizens’ evaluations of promise keeping and breaking. We focus on two aspects of trust as explanations of citizens’ evaluations. When trust is defined in terms of mistrust, it implies that vigilant and well-informed citizens base their evaluations on what governments deliver. When trust is defined in terms of distrust, it implies that citizens use heuristic thinking when evaluating governing parties’ performance, regardless of what those parties do. Our evidence is from a survey experiment in the British Election Study, which asked respondents to evaluate whether governing parties fulfilled specific election pledges made during the previous election campaign. The findings indicate that both mistrust and distrust affect citizens’ evaluations.
In this paper, the authors give us one more reason to think that contemporary voters are discontented with the quality of representative democracy in Britain. And this for one of the most primitive of reasons: because the system is (increasingly) unrepresentative of voters' diverse beliefs. As the Conservative and Labour parties have moved closer together, so have voters tended to find themselves increasingly distant ideologically from either of the two major parties. As the authors note, 'vote-seeking parties have left the British party system less representative, and thus made at least some voters miserable'. This is a paper which skilfully combines the conceptual and the empirical to make a telling point about the declining quality of representative democracy. bs_bs_banner
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