Consumer Demand for Election News: The Horserace Sells

Abstract

Reports on the state of the horserace and analysis of the candidates' strategies are pervasive themes in news coverage of campaigns. Various explanations have been suggested for the dominance of strategy-oriented over hard news. The most frequently identified factors are the length of the modern campaign, the built-in conflict between journalists and campaign operatives, and the pressures of the marketplace. This paper provides a test of the market hypothesis. Given access to a wide variety of news reports about the presidential campaign in the weeks immediately preceding the 2000 election, we find that voters were drawn to reports on the horserace and strategy. Strategy reports proved far more popular than reports about the issues. Although media organizations stand to profit, the overproduction of horserace news takes a toll on the political commons. Our results indicate that exposure to this genre of campaign news contributed to increased cynicism about the candidates and the electoral process itself.

Political communication in a high-choice media environment: a challenge for democracy?

“…With respect to the US, Graber (1988) and Zaller (1999) have argued that the appetite for hard political news among the general public is limited. Support for this can be found in research showing that in terms of political news, in an experimental setting most people prefer horse race-coverage and find strategy or game-related campaign coverage more appealing than issue coverage (Iyengar, Norpoth, & Hahn, 2004). More recently, a study by Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013), based on patterns of news item selection, suggest that the tendency towards more soft news is driven by audience preferences.…”

Media and Presidential Nomination Campaigns: When Bad News Becomes Good News (or at least a little better)

“…Iyengar et al (2004) find support for the marketplace view of horserace coverage. They found voters more drawn to stories of this nature, particularly among those with higher levels of political engagement.…”

Turning Voters on? Effects of News Frame Exposure on Voter Mobilization in the 2008 Austrian Elections

“…First, we turn to the game frame that is widely described as being a potential factor for attracting the audience [32], and thus, may also make people more attentive toward the campaign and engage voters [33]. It shares a great deal of common ground with the sometimes even changeably applied concepts of horse race framing [10] or strategy framing [12,23].…”

“…We hypothesize that game framing may primarily function as a mobilizing factor which does not only activate the contest notion but also may encourage voters to go to the polls by suggesting that every single vote may make a difference. Additionally we base our hypothesis also on the reported heightened attractiveness of horse race reports [32].…”