Changing Tides: Evidence of Shifting Media Support for Political Actors

The support of (print) media for political actors plays a vital role for electoral success. While many newspapers have a rather persistent political leaning, some change their priorities between election campaigns. In this paper, we analyze the support and deterrence that different newspapers offer to different political actors across election campaigns. We draw on a combination of secondary data, coming from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), and primary data, collected at the Universität Innsbruck, encompassing 16,125 newspaper articles from election coverage of four Austrian parliament elections. Based on quantitative content analysis, we developed an index of media support, incorporating a political actors’ visibility as well as the tone and the main issue of a news article. We demonstrate that the index is strongly associated with a political party’s subsequent, aggregated vote share in the Austrian case. Furthermore, we show that media support for political parties is susceptible to change across election campaigns, especially in tabloid newspapers.