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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We thank Spiegel Publishing for providing access to their newspaper archives. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractThis paper studies the effect of news media on the probability of resignation from office of politicians being subject to criminal investigation. Using data on cases in which the political immunity of German representatives was lifted, we find that resignations are more common when the media covers the case intensely. The amounts of this news coverage, in turn, depend on the availability of other newsworthy, exogenous events. Therefore, we instrument for coverage of lifts of immunity with the overall news pressure. We estimate the causal effect and find that a 1 standard deviation increase in the amount of the coverage raises the likelihood of resignation by 22.3 percentage points.

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This article analyses the news coverage of German federal presidents' private lives and personal characteristics. The federal president is the only constitutional entity in Germany to consist of just one person. Automatically, the incumbent's personality is important in determining how the person exercises the role. Although the federal president's office possesses little hard power competences, as a politician the federal president has an integrative function and is one of the most powerful opinion leaders of the country. A successful presidency therefore hinges on mediated visibility. Recently, political communication scholars have identified a trend towards intimization politics. This article specifically investigates how news coverage of the German federal president has developed since 1949. The results are twofold: first, the mediated visibility of the federal president has increased over time. Second, the current analysis does not provide evidence for a trend towards intimization politics.

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