One consistent finding within journalism research is the media's heavy reliance on the so-called game frame when covering the political process. One main component of this frame is the frequent use of horse race polls, a tool that by its zero-sum nature provides journalists with immense opportunities to portray political actors as either winners or losers. While there is an extensive literature on how horse race reporting can influence opinion formation and political behavior among citizens, little is known about how such coverage affects journalists' coverage of political parties. To remedy this, this paper investigates how the tone toward political parties in media's poll coverage affects the subsequent tone toward political parties in general (non-poll related) news coverage. This is done by using time-series regression on a large dataset of daily Swedish top news stories (n = 7553), covering a period of 4 years (2014-2018). The main finding is that positively framed poll stories appear to affect the tone in subsequent coverage, while there does not appear to be a corresponding effect of negatively framed poll stories.
New political cleavages are reshaping the political landscape in established democracies. The classic left-right ideological dimension that has structured politics for decades is increasingly challenged by a sociocultural value dimension. At the same time, growing opportunities for media choice open for new forms of selective news exposure along political lines. We argue that previous research has too narrowly focused on traditional ideological cleavages, neglecting the increasingly important sociocultural value dimension of politics. Using four waves of panel survey data collected in Sweden during 2020 and 2021, this study analyses ideological selective exposure, audience composition, and reinforcing spirals across a range of mainstream and alternative news outlets. Findings show (1) that the sociocultural value dimension is more important than the socioeconomic dimension for explaining news choices, (2) that it structures news audiences in uniquely distinct ways, and (3) that these relationships are highly stable over time—reflecting patterns of de facto selective exposure and ideological maintenance, rather than reinforcement. These findings bring new insights to research on selective news exposure, political polarization, and changing ideological cleavages in Western democracies.
One key question in research on the mediatization of politics concerns how political actors are influenced by the news media. Using a unique dataset of more than 2,400 Swedish politicians, this study bridges two literatures—the arena framework of strategic party behavior, and research on elite perceptions of media power—by investigating how politicians assess the influence of mediás publication of opinion polls. The results show that published opinion polls are seen as highly influential, but that perceptions of influence vary between the internal, electoral, media, and parliamentary arenas on which political parties act. Furthermore, on the electoral and media arena, the perceived influence of published opinion polls is found to be a function of how the politician’s party has performed on the polls. More specifically, politicians who believe their party to have either increased or decreased their poll support since the previous election deem polls as more influential compared to politicians who perceive that their party has not moved in the polls.
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