Gaining voice in the mass media: The effect of parties’ strategies on party–issue linkages in election news coverage

How party‒issue linkages vary between election manifestos and media debates

“…Exploring the similarity of both distributions in more detail, the right panel of Figure 1 shows a scatterplot of both variables. In line with existing research (Merz 2017), the correlation between the two salience scores is notably high (r = 0.53, p < 0.01). Thus, issue salience in party manifestos and in newspapers show similar patterns.…”

“…In order to assess the degree to which parties highlight or downplay an issue or are associated with certain topics, the concept of issue salience These considerations are particularly relevant for direct party communication. However, when it comes to party-issue linkages reported in the news, not only salience strategies of parties, but especially the media's gatekeeping, plays a crucial role (Haselmayer et al 2017(Haselmayer et al , 2019Helfer and Van Aelst 2016;Hopmann et al 2012;Merz 2017;Meyer et al 2017). Due to media outlet space restrictions in combination with considerations about the newsworthiness of political messages, the likelihood of party-issue linkages is expected to vary because journalists and editors use their positions to select messages with high news value (Staab 1990).…”

“…Finally, relevance increases the chances of a message being covered in news reports about political issues, which makes generally salient topics more likely to be covered (Haselmayer et al 2017). In summary, the selection of party-issue linkages in media reports is assumed to be highly dependent on their news value (Haselmayer et al 2017;Helfer and Van Aelst 2016;Merz 2017;Van Aelst and Walgrave 2016). Given these differences between direct and mediated campaign communication, the issue in question is the degree to which party-issue linkages differ across platforms.…”

“…43 (2020), Iss. 4, p. 796 that issue salience in direct party communication is related to the coverage of parties' issue statements in the media (Merz 2017), but it also points out that not all issue-related party messages are equally likely to gain media attention (Haselmayer et al 2017(Haselmayer et al , 2019Meyer et al 2017). This begs the question of the degree to which issue salience, as observed by voters in the media, deviates from patterns found in direct party communication.…”

Politicizing immigration in Western Europe

“…On the one hand, available research suggests that parties, which strongly emphasize an issue in their manifestos, will also play an important role in campaign debates as covered by the mass media. Research shows that despite the gate keeping role of the media, the issue emphasis strategies as found in party manifestos are translated into the news coverage of political parties (Merz 2017). Against this background, we expect that radical right populist parties employing issue entrepreneurial strategies in their manifestos are particularly visible in the media, provided that the issue is politicized.…”