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6. The media and European Parliament elections: Second-rate coverage of a second-order event?
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S I X The media and European Parliament elections: Second-rate coverage of a second-order event? claes h. de vreese, edmund lauf, and jochen peter European elections are often referred to as second-order national elections . Following the first elections for the European Parliament in 1979, Reif and Schmitt (1980) asserted that European elections are not essentially about ‘Euro-politics’ but about national, domestic politics. As a result citizens rely mainly on their relationship to the domestic political arena when deciding whether and how to vote. Reif and Schmitt (1980) offer three propositions about second-order elections: first, turnout is likely to be lower; second, national government parties are likely to suffer losses in European Parliament elections; and, third, larger political parties are likely to do less well than smaller parties. The second-order election model has been tested, refined, and largely supported in subsequent European elections (e.g., Oppenhuis, van der Eijk, and Franklin 1996; Marsh 1998). So far, the second-order election perspective has not been used in the analysis of the media. This is surprising. After all, media play a crucial role in the linkage between citizens and the political realm. Citizens’ experiences with politics are largely mediated by the mass media (e.g., Swanson and Mancini 1996; Bennett and Entman 2001). Even more so than for domestic politics is this the case for a distant institution such as the European Parliament , its elections, and the accompanying campaigns (e.g., Blumler 1983). 116 chapter This chapter analyses news coverage of the campaigns of the European elections of 1999 and tests a number of expectations that can be derived from the second-order election literature and from previous research on contextual differences between second-order elections. Studies of election outcomes and voter behavior demonstrate that a second-order election’s location in the domestic electoral cycle affects the extent of government and big party losses (Oppenhuis, van der Eijk, and Franklin 1996; Marsh 1998; also chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this volume). Other studies suggest that the extent of polarization of elite opinions affects the presence or absence of public debates about Europe and its effects on public opinion (Peter 2003). This chapter addresses three main aspects of news coverage of the elections and their campaigns: visibility of the coverage, presentation as a domestic or European political contest, and tone of the coverage. For the first two aspects we analyze the impact of the aforementioned contextual differences. Expectations The logic of second-order election theory and findings in previous research give rise to clear expectations about the three aspects of news coverage we want to analyze. As far as visibility is concerned, we first of all expect this to be low in the case of European elections in comparison to coverage of first-order domestic elections. In view of the low salience of European elections for voters and parties, we could hardly expect their visibility in the media to be very high. The most encompassing study of a campaign for the European elections so far dates back to the first European election in 1979 (Blumler 1983). A comparative analysis of television coverage in all member states of the (then) EC showed that ‘Europe’ did not surface on the media agenda before the actual campaign started. However, as the campaign progressed, the amount of television attention to the European elections increased (Siune 1983). Media coverage and political communication were hardly investigated during later European elections. One of the few available studies concluded that, while the first elections did receive some degree of media coverage because of the novelty of the event, this aspect had already vanished from the second elections (in 1984) onward. As of the second time around, the campaign was ‘nothing special’ (Leroy and Siune 1994, 52–53). However, no previous analyses of media investigated whether cross-national variationinthevisibilityofnewscoverageoftheelectioncampaigncanbelinkedto contextual factors such as polarized elite opinion and the timing of the European The media and European Parliament elections 117 [18.189.13.43] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:59 GMT) elections in the domestic electoral cycle. From what we know about such variations in election results and in the behavior of voters and parties, we expect that the European elections will be more prominent in the news in countries that are close to an upcoming general election because the relevance of these elections in the domestic political arena is then largest (for an extended presentation of this argument, see Oppenhuis, van der Eijk, and...