Studying the Tango

Abstract

The relationship between politicians and journalists is often portrayed as an intimate dance, characterized by intFerdependence. The political agenda-setting approach has been used successfully to improve our knowledge of certain aspects of this power relationship. This study builds on this line of research, but in more depth by conducting a detailed and reciprocal analysis of the relationship between press coverage and parliamentary questions in the Netherlands (1995Á2010). Our macro-level approach shows that the effect of media on written questions is stronger than the reverse. A more detailed micro-analysis of media coverage preceding and following oral questions does indicate that most of the questions can be traced back to coverage in the days before, but that they receive less media attention afterwards. This might initially indicate that the media are leading the dance with parliamentarians, at least when it comes to questioning behaviour. In many instances, however, media are not creating the news that MPs rely on, but rather are transmitters of information that originates from other political and nonpolitical sources.Journalism Studies, 2014 Vol. 15, No. 4, 392Á410, http://dx.

Parliamentary questions as strategic party tools

“…By focusing on the share of questions to each minister, we exclude variation in the number of questions asked to each minister, which is not the focus of our analysis. Previous analyses have shown that media attention has a large impact on the topics covered in parliamentary questions (Van Aelst and Vliegenthart 2014;. The second way to measure our dependent variable effectively controls for this.…”

“…In the literature on parliamentary questions two approaches have been prominent: the first focuses on the use of parliamentary questions as an electoral tool for individual MPs (Bailer 2011;Mayhew 1974;Russo and Wiberg 2010;Saalfeld 2011). The second examines the relationship between the media agenda and the parliamentary agenda as reflected by parliamentary questions (Van Aelst and Vliegenthart 2014;Vliegenthart 2010, 2012). Despite the fact that we know that MP behaviour reflects the aims and strategies of their parties, most of this work aims to explain how many questions individual MPs ask or the topics they focus on.…”

Partisan Bias in Message Selection: Media Gatekeeping of Party Press Releases

“…Therefore, a journalistic heuristic to focus on messages by favored political actors would to some extent be insufficient, as even the most favored actors send more messages than a media outlet could report on. Thus, editors and journalists need to ignore most messages, even those from political actors they prefer the most (e.g., Meyer, Haselmayer, & Wagner, 2015;Van Aelst & Vliegenthart, 2014;Van Santen et al, 2015). 1 When choosing among messages from the same political actor, journalists and editors will therefore prefer to report on campaign messages that have the additional benefit of containing (higher) news value.…”

“…Previous research has considered party issue agenda-setting in the media (Brandenburg, 2002(Brandenburg, , 2006Hopmann et al, 2012) or the visibility of political actors in the news (Cook, 1988;Gattermann & Vasilopoulou, 2015;Kriesi, 2012;Tresch, 2009). More recent studies have focused on media gatekeeping of individual messages such as parliamentary questions (Van Aelst & Vliegenthart, 2014;Van Santen et al, 2015) and party pledges (Kostadinova, 2015). So far, little research on gatekeeping has looked at press releases, with a few exceptions from the United States (Flowers, Haynes, & Crespin, 2003;Grimmer, 2010Grimmer, , 2013 and Europe (Helfer & Van Aelst, 2016).…”

Problem Identification and Agenda Setting

“…The influence of the media on the parliamentary agenda in the Netherlands has grown considerably over time (Van Noije, Kleinnijenhuis, & Oegema, 2008). Dutch parliamentary questions are, indeed, almost always inspired or influenced by media attention (Van Aelst & Vliegenthart, 2013). Figure 10.1 shows the number of written questions asked by Dutch members of parliament about tobacco control.…”