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2017 | Buch

How Political Actors Use the Media

A Functional Analysis of the Media’s Role in Politics

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This book investigates how individual politicians and political parties strategically make use of the media to reach their political goals. Looking beyond a purely Americentric viewpoint, the chapters present data from more than ten Western democracies to argue that the media are both a source of information and an arena for political communication. This double functional role of the media is examined from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, including chapters dealing with different aspects of politics - from campaigning to law making - and within different political contexts. The role of the news media is discussed from the perspective of the political actor, focusing on both the opportunities and the constraints the news media provide, resulting in a multidisciplinary text that will appeal to students and scholars of both communication and political science.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Information and Arena: The Dual Function of the News Media for Political Elites
Abstract
How do individual politicians use the news media to reach their political goals? The authors argue that this question can be best addressed by using an actor-centered, functional approach. The chapter develops the “Information & Arena” model to distinguish two essential functions the mass media have for political elites. The media are a source of information and politicians can profit from the momentum generated by media information. The media also are an arena elites need access to in order to promote themselves and their issues. These two functions offer certain politicians a structural advantage over others and are relevant for the power struggle among political elites. A systematic functional account allows comparison of the role of the media across politicians and political systems.
Peter Van Aelst, Stefaan Walgrave

Conceptualizing Media Influence in Politics

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. An Intervening Intermediary: Making Political Sense of Media Influence
Abstract
This theoretical chapter puts political actors’ news use into a broader political science context. Despite increasing acknowledgement of the media as a political institution and actor, media influence on politics should be distinguished from other types of influence typically studied by political scientists. Media influence is not about what the media “gets”, but rather about how news intervene in the political processes that determine the distribution of power between other political actors and institutions. We call this the second layer of media’s political influence, and argue that studies of media and politics should to a larger extent use theories about the strategies and motives of political actors as a starting point in order to contribute to the explanation of who gets what, when, and how.
Gunnar Thesen
Chapter 3. Celebrities as Political Actors and Entertainment as Political Media
Abstract
This chapter advocates a more inclusive approach to how we define “political actors” and “the media”. The authors highlight the importance of celebrity entertainers as political actors, both within entertainment formats and within the traditional media arena. Additionally, they point to the ways in which entertainment can function as political media. They argue that increasingly blurred boundaries between “entertainment” and “news” have opened pathways for entertainers to enter and shape the political field, and for political actors of all stripes to use (and be used by) entertainment media. They illustrate their argument with the case of Donald Trump, discussing how Trump was able to gain such high public support in part because the media treated him as an entertainer as much as a candidate.
Regina G. Lawrence, Amber E. Boydstun
Chapter 4. Political Public Relations and Mediatization: The Strategies of News Management
Abstract
In highly mediatized democracies, political parties and other political actors have to manage the news and adapt to the fact that news media have become largely independent and highly influential. In this chapter, the authors bridge theory and research on strategic party behavior, mediatization, and political public relations to analyze why and how political parties seek to manage the news to further their strategic goals. Based on a review of the literature, the authors suggest a typology of strategies and tactics that political parties can use to manage the news. One conclusion is that adaption to news media need to follow from the strategic goals of the party. Otherwise adapting to news media is not strategic but rather surrendering to news media and news media logic.
Jesper Strömbäck, Frank Esser
Chapter 5. Too Powerful or Just Doing Their Job? Explaining Differences in Conceptions of Media Power Among Politicians and Journalists
Abstract
Within the broader debate about media and politics, a remarkable observation is that journalists and politicians evaluate the size of the political influence of the media fundamentally differently. While politicians tend to emphasize the strong influence of media over their work, journalists tend to downplay this impact. This chapter discusses and empirically tests several explanations for this gap in perceptions. Derived from literature on mediatization, journalistic role perceptions, and political agenda setting, several explanations are put forward. Based on existing comparative surveys with journalists and politicians, and some additional additionally in-depth interviews with Dutch and Danish politicians and journalists, this chapter investigates how we can explain these different evaluations of the political power of the media.
Rens Vliegenthart, Morten Skovsgaard

The Media as a Source of Information

Frontmatter
Chapter 6. What Politicians Learn from the Mass Media and Why They React to It: Evidence from Elite Interviews
Abstract
This chapter explores the informational function of the mass media in politicians’ work. More precisely, it focuses on instances where political elites actively use media coverage in their political work—called “political agenda-setting processes”. It tries to understand what role the media precisely play in these instances. The central claim is that the interpretation of media effects on political agendas is dependent on two factors: (1) what politicians learn from the media when they react to it and (2) which motivations underlie politicians’ reactions to media information. The author develops a theoretical model that integrates the various possible learning and motivational mechanisms. By means of in-depth interviews, she tests whether political elites themselves confirm the existence of these mechanisms.
Julie Sevenans
Chapter 7. The Media Independency of Political Elites
Abstract
We employ a novel design to explore to what extent the media are significant information suppliers for politicians. In three countries—Belgium, Canada, and Israel—we surveyed national political elites and asked them about the main, actual media stories published in the weeks preceding the interview. Elites were asked whether they knew about the underlying news fact before it appeared in the news media and what share of all they knew about the underlying facts originated from news media coverage. Their answers seem to suggest that their media dependency is quite strong. Most importantly, story features and characteristics of individual politicians interactively determine to what extent a politician is dependent on the media for information about current affairs.
Stefaan Walgrave, Julie Sevenans, Alon Zoizner, Matthew Ayling
Chapter 8. When Politicians React to the Media: How the Attitudes and Goals of Political Elites Moderate the Effect of the Media on the Political Agenda
Abstract
The media’s role in shaping politicians’ priorities (political agenda-setting) is usually examined at the institutional level. However, we do not know how politicians’ individual-level characteristics—specifically their attitudes and goals—moderate their responsiveness to the media in real-life. The current study is the first to examine this by using the Israeli case. Results highlight the arena function of the media: the more politicians represent their party-line over public demands, the more responsive they are to media agenda. This indicates that party representatives try to promote their party in the media, which become an arena for partisan conflicts. However, no relationship is found between the degree to which politicians feel overwhelmed by information and media responsiveness.
Alon Zoizner, Yair Fogel-Dror, Tamir Sheafer

The Media as a Political Arena

Frontmatter
Chapter 9. Moving Beyond the Single Mediated Arena Model: Media Uses and Influences Across Three Arena’s
Abstract
This chapter draws on multiple interview-based studies of 180 United Kingdom political actors over two decades. It argues that research on media uses and influences on politicians needs to be conceived beyond a single mediatized arena model. Rather, these functions operate across three overlapping communicative spaces: the more private policy arena, the heavily mediatized political arena of a parliament, and the larger public arena (or public sphere) beyond. How political actors use and are influenced by media/journalists varies across these three arenas. After setting out the arenas and findings the model is further illustrated with two short case studies: the election of David Cameron to head of the Conservative Party (2005) and the issues around European Union membership and the recent Brexit vote (2016).
Aeron Davis
Chapter 10. The Charm of Salient Issues? Parties’ Strategic Behavior in Press Releases
Abstract
During election campaigns political actors strategically choose issues to focus on. Besides highlighting issues over which a party exerts issue ownership, they may also engage with issues highly salient in the media. The present chapter analyses under which conditions parties prefer focusing on the issues they own, and in which cases they rather pay attention to issues on the media agenda. A content analysis of press releases and newspaper coverage in Switzerland, Germany, France and Great Britain during national election campaigns shows that issue ownership matters across countries and explains quite well the parties’ issue selection strategies. However, exogenous events like crisis, scandals or catastrophes motivate to follow up on news coverage, even at the cost of owned issues.
Caroline Dalmus, Regula Hänggli, Laurent Bernhard
Chapter 11. News Tone and the Government in the News: When and Why Do Government Actors Appear in the News?
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the political tone of news coverage. Three issues are examined. First, we find that news is always more negative than positive from the point of view of the government, although the degree of negativity varies across issues. Second, results show that incumbents appear more often in the news when the tone of the coverage is positive, while opposition presence is linked to a substantially higher share of negative news. Finally, we explore the causal and temporal patterns between variations in news tone and government presence. The findings indicate that increased government presence in the news is a reaction to negative news, but show no signs that the government is able to make subsequent news coverage of an issue more favorable.
Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Peter B. Mortensen, Gunnar Thesen

Combining Information and Arena

Frontmatter
Chapter 12. Why Do Politicians Use the Media When Making Laws? A Study On the Functional Use of Mass Media During Legislative Processes
Abstract
Previous work on media and politics pays little attention to why politicians use the media in their work. This chapter addresses this topic in the context of lawmaking, a fundamental policy making process. The starting point of is the information and arena model: we study whether mass media are a source of information as well as an arena for political communication to Members of Parliament when they are considering bills. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with legislators in the Netherlands, in the context of three case studies. We find that some politicians use the mass media as a source of information in the context of lawmaking, but that the media is not very frequently used as an arena for political communication.
Lotte Melenhorst, Peter Van Aelst
Chapter 13. Information Source and Political Arena: How Actors from Inside and Outside Politics Use the Media
Abstract
Based on the distinction between the media’s role as an information source and a political arena, this chapter analyses how politicians and other political actors use the media during the political process. A quantitative survey of German Members of the Bundestag, civil servants, associations and NGOs, and researchers in energy policy was conducted in 2011 (N = 262; response rate = 35%). The results underline the significant importance of the media for political actors to receive information on citizens and other political actors, but also to communicate with other political actors and to influence policy-making. While the media’s information function is more important for political actors from outside the political-administrative system, the arena function is slightly more relevant for politicians.
Nayla Fawzi
Chapter 14. Elaborating and Specifying the Information & Arena Framework
Abstract
This chapter draws theoretical and empirical lessons from the book. It argues that the evidence in the different chapters clearly underscores the existence of both functions. Politicians are informed by the media, and they enter the media arena. The crucial thing is that the media use of politicians varies across politicians, across issues and, most likely, also across political systems. There is a crucial distinction between government and opposition actors. The more powerful actors can more easily enter the media arena and, at the same time, they are less dependent on the information provided by the mass media. Also, their specialization and personal attitudes and role perceptions do seem to systematically affect how politicians use the media.
Stefaan Walgrave, Peter Van Aelst
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
How Political Actors Use the Media
herausgegeben von
Peter Van Aelst
Prof. Stefaan Walgrave
Copyright-Jahr
2017
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-60249-3
Print ISBN
978-3-319-60248-6
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60249-3