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When politics becomes news: An analysis of parliamentary questions and press coverage in three West European countries

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Abstract

This study addresses two questions that are part of the larger debate on mediatized politics. First, we want to know to what extent the work of members of parliament is mediatized. Second, we want to know how the interaction between media and parliamentary politics is determined by the institutional context. To address these questions we present a content analysis of oral parliamentary questions (PQs) and press coverage in three West European countries: the Netherlands, France and Germany. This way we improve the insight in when and why specific political initiatives receive media attention, and if specific characteristics of these initiatives and the institutional context in which they are used increase the chance and amount thereof. Results from the regression analysis show that the most important factor in determining newsworthiness is the amount of media attention for a certain topic preceding the PQ. In addition, the analysis has shown that in the Netherlands and France voicing criticism towards a member of government in a PQ slightly increases the chances of getting covered by a newspaper. Finally, as expected, in the Netherlands the oral PQs are the most newsworthy, and in Germany the least, with France taking a middle position.

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Notes

  1. The focus on national politics is confirmed by our data on parliamentary questions. Overall, 67 per cent of the PQs focus on national issues. In Germany this is slightly lower (62 per cent) because of a higher amount of PQs that relate to international politics. In the three countries the share of questions on local issues is almost identical: in the Netherlands 15 per cent, in France 13 per cent and in Germany 12 per cent. The rules and procedures of the different parliaments can be found at: www.tweedekamer.nl, www.bundestag.de, and www.assemblee-nationale.fr.

  2. The codebook can be obtained from the authors on request.

  3. Intercoder-agreement was assessed on a sub-sample of the data for each country, yielding an average agreement level (percentage agreement across all relevant codes) of 80 per cent. The average agreement level for the French data is 69 per cent for the presented content variables, for the Dutch data 74 per cent and for the German data 97 per cent. To ensure comparability of coding between countries, all coders were asked to code the same fictive PQs, yielding an average agreement level of 70 per cent for the presented content variables. The reliability coefficients were calculated by PRAM (Program for Reliability Assessment with Multiple Coders) (Neuendorf, 2002).

  4. We selected the five biggest national newspapers of each country that were available to us. The Netherlands: NRC Handelsblad, de Telegraaf, De Volkskrant, Trouw, Algemeen Dagblad. France: La Croix, Le Figaro, L'Humanité, Libération, Le Parisien-Aujourd'hui en France. Germany: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Der Tagesspiegel, Financial Times Deutschland, taz - Die tageszeitung.

  5. Lexis Nexis was used to search newspaper articles for the Netherlands, and Factiva was used for newspaper articles for Germany and France. Coders would first determine keywords for each PQ and then search newspaper articles in the databases using these keywords. Selection of relevant articles is explained in main text.

  6. The highest amount of newspaper articles found afterwards for one individual PQ was eight; this occurred only once. For a French PQ.

  7. In our analysis all issues (and thus all issue types) are included. As agenda-setting research suggests that media pay more attention to certain specific issues (Soroka, 2002; Walgrave et al, 2008), we tried to include this in our analysis. But including specific issues or issue-type dummies proved both theoretically difficult, and did also not, after trying various categorizations, result in significant outcomes. We have therefore not included issues as independent variable(s) in our theory nor results sections.

  8. If not directed at a member of government, questions were addressed to the state secretary (the Netherlands and France) or the ‘Bundestag’, the German second chamber.

  9. With a negative binomial regression, the predicted scores presented in the table are in the form of the logarithm of counts, an unfamiliar metric. To interpret the scores in the original count metric, the equation needs to be exponentiated (see for a detailed explanation for instance Coxe et al, 2009).

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van Santen, R., Helfer, L. & van Aelst, P. When politics becomes news: An analysis of parliamentary questions and press coverage in three West European countries. Acta Polit 50, 45–63 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.33

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