During the last decennia media environments and political communication systems have changed fundamentally. These changes have major ramifications for the political information environments and the extent to which they aid people in becoming informed citizens. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to review research on key changes and trends in political information environments and assess their democratic implications. We will focus on advanced postindustrial democracies and six concerns that are all closely linked to the dissemination and acquisition of political knowledge: (1) declining supply of political information, (2) declining quality of news, (3) increasing media concentration and declining diversity of news, (4) increasing fragmentation and polarization, (5) increasing relativism and (6) increasing inequality in political knowledge. ARTICLE HISTORY

It is widely believed that populists benefit from crisis situations. This chapter discusses the literature on crises and populism from a theoretical perspective and provides a novel framework of analysis for addressing the study of the COVID-19 crisis in the light of its (de)politicization. This framework allows the study of the politicization of the COVID-19 issue by populists looking at the divide between the political and the non-political status of the issue, disputes about different stakes and their relative priority in managing the crisis, and issue-specific and policy-related contentions about COVID-19. The general research question is whether populists in Europe used the COVID-19 issue to gain centrality in the political field and/or to push forward new opposition lines. A further related question is to pinpoint whether populists reacted in a similar way across countries or whether they adapted their response according to their institutional role.

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