Priming Europe: Media effects on loyalty, voice and exit in European Parliament elections

Abstract

Abstract:Parties in government face a decline in EP elections after experiencing a surge in votes to win the national election. This occurs because voters are more inclined to give voice to their dissatisfaction with current government performance by voting for the opposition or exiting because less is at stake in second-order elections. These elections negatively affect the electoral fortunes of governing parties as voters opt to punish poorly performing national governments in EP elections. Meanwhile, greater reliance on the EU issue dimension in vote choice models is taken as evidence for the increasing Europeanisation of EP elections. We examine the role of the media in making the EU issue dimension salient in such a way that government parties may benefit electorally from this increased saliency. To examine whether visibility of government party actors in media coverage increases loyalty for the governing parties either directly or via priming the EU issues for voters, we combine survey data from the 2009 European Election Studies (EES) with data on news coverage of those elections that links the governing party to the EU issue. We show that where the government is visible in EU news coverage, EU issue voting tends to increase loyalty while decreasing the probability to vote for the opposition and thus improves the electoral prospects for governing parties. This is even more the case if the issue is primed by negative campaign coverage.1

Intra-Campaign Changes in Voting Preferences: The Impact of Media and Party Communication

“…Moreover, the tone of news media reporting affects citizens’ party choices: Voters are more likely to vote for a candidate or party if the news media report favorably about them (e.g., de Vreese & Semetko, 2004; Geers & Bos, 2017; Hopmann, Vliegenthart, de Vreese, & Albæk, 2010; Lengauer & Johann, 2013; Norris, 1999; Vliegenthart, Schuck, Boomgaarden, & de Vreese, 2008; but see Dassonneville, 2012; Giebler, Kritzinger, Xezonakis, & Banducci, 2017). …”

EU issue voting and the 2014 European Parliament elections: a dynamic perspective

“…Studies on the 2014 EP elections show that EU attitudes are an important motivation for voting forparticularly right-wing -Eurosceptic parties (Hobolt 2015;Hobolt and De Vries 2016). Other studies have looked at the role of EU attitudes in explaining defection from government to opposition parties (Clark and Rohrschneider 2009;Hobolt, Spoon, and Tilley 2009) or party-switching from national to EP elections (Hobolt and Spoon 2012) or both (Giebler et al 2017). None of these studies, however, address voting for pro-EU parties as a separate categoryeven if we know that there are parties with a distinctively positive EU stance in most party systems (Adam et al 2017).…”

New perspectives on information and electoral competition

“…However, due to some technical peculiarities it was published in an earlier issue (1/ 2017). The paper by Giebler et al (2017) provides in way a follow-up part to the paper by Merz. It focuses on the behavioral consequences of parties' visibility in the media.…”