The Incumbency Bonus Revisited: Causes and Consequences of Media Dominance

Abstract

The literature on political actors’ media appearances has repeatedly documented the so-called incumbency bonus (that parties and politicians in government have more media coverage than those in the opposition). This bias is normally attributed to news criteria that reflect political power, such as relevance and the elite status of actors. Supplementing existing perspectives, this study puts forward a new explanation of the incumbency bonus. The article argues that variations in the media dominance of incumbents are the result of the interplay between journalistic norms and political context. Outside election campaigns, political news is driven by the ‘watch dog’ norm. Thus the media focus on societal problems, which produces a critical emphasis on incumbent actors. But when party competition intensifies, either during campaigns or when issues become salient, the norm of objective and impartial journalism results in a more balanced coverage where challengers increase their presence. The argument receives support through multivariate models of incumbent and challenger appearances in Danish radio news broadcasts over a twenty-year period. Finally, in terms of democratic implications, the importance of the watchdog norm challenges the assumption that the incumbency bonus constitutes an electoral asset. Since media dominance is closely related to government responsibility for all kinds of problems, incumbent support is found to dwindle with increased media appearances.

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

“…Similarly, party communication may be particularly intense and conflictual in election periods compared to non-election times. On the other hand, the media may strive harder to maintain journalistic balance in the runup to an election (e.g., Green-Pedersen et al, 2017;Van Aelst & De Swert, 2009;Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2006).…”

Priming Issues, Party Visibility, and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

“…This temporal order indicates that party evaluations in the news are more likely to influence party support instead of the other way around. This does not mean that evaluations between the two waves are not affected by an increase in support prior to the first wave (see Green-Pedersen, Mortensen, & Thesen, 2015). Whether the relation between evaluative news and party support is reciprocal can be addressed in future studies.…”

Gaining voice in the mass media: The effect of parties’ strategies on party–issue linkages in election news coverage

“…Consequentially, research analyzed why and which parties and politicians get into the news. This line of research looked mostly at general characteristics of parties and politicians such as whether a party is the incumbent (Schoenbach et al, 2001;Hopmann et al, 2011;Green-Pedersen et al, 2015), or whether a politician is the leader of a party (Tresch, 2009;Midtbø, 2011). However, this line of research has done little to explain a party's varying visibility across issues -an idea that is at the core of party-issue linkages.…”