How to report on elections? The effects of game, issue and negative coverage on reader engagement and incivility

Abstract

This study investigates to what extent specific features of news articles about election campaigns impact reader engagement and civility in news comments. Using content analysis of articles ( N = 830) and comments ( N = 29,421) published during the 2015 Portuguese Legislative elections, we test the impact of negative coverage, issue coverage and game coverage (politics as a game) on the number of comments that an article receives and the level of civility thereof. Additionally, we explore how affective polarisation of a commenter may moderate the effects on incivility. Findings show that negativity towards political actors in an article is tied to both an increase in the number of comments and their level of incivility. Game coverage only led to a significant increase in the number of comments, while actor-related positivity was also related to an increase in incivility. Issue coverage had neither positive nor negative effects. The results inform newsrooms and academics about the implications of different types of election reporting, while accounting for features of news articles that are typically not integrated in a single study.

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“…Results of the content analysis of user comments on the website and the Facebook page of the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard show that nearly every third of the comments analyzed contained incivility. Levels of incivility in the online discussions on COVID-19 found in this study are comparable to those found in prior studies on various other topics which ranged between 20 and 40% (Coe et al, 2014;Santana, 2014;Rowe, 2015a;Su et al, 2018;Gonçalves et al, 2020;Rossini, 2020). Despite its polarizing character, topics related to COVID-19 do not seem to generate higher levels of incivility compared to other topics.…”

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The “populist imbecile” versus the “heartless shrew”: Polarizing election coverage and voters’ evaluation in Taiwan

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