We investigate the evolution of political campaign coverage through a content analysis of the topics highlighted in newspapers' agendas during three presidential elections in Chile. Results show an expected increase in the space allocated to the politicians' private lives (privatisation) by 2009, but no change in the attention given to individual politicians' political traits (political competence). Coverage of candidates' campaign strategies had increased markedly in media agendas by 1999, and by 2009 in politicians' agendas. These changes are consistent with some of the recent transformations of political communication in Western democracies, within the framework of the so-called 'mediatisation' of politics.
We investigate the evolution of the coverage of political campaigns in Chile, through a content analysis of the issues highlighted in four national newspapers in the 1989 and 2009 campaigns. We seek to determine the increases of two types of personalization and the coverage of the candidates’ strategies. We focus on personalization, understood first as “competences” (the coverage of political-personal characteristics of the candidates) which differ from the “privatization” (highlights the private lives of the candidates). Results show an expected increase in the space allocated to privatization and strategies, but no change in the coverage of the political traits of the candidates.
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