Power of feelings? Election news coverage and the role of emotions in the 2013 German election campaign
Note short:
Time:
20.10.2014 - 12:00
Location :
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Type of Event :
AB B-Kolloquium
Lecturer:
Lecturer affiliation:
Description:
This study is part of a larger research project entitled "Dealing with feelings: The (de-)mobilizing role of emotions in political communiction" investigating which emotions are sparked by political news coverage and how these engage or disengage citizens in politics. The present study is interested in the role of emotions in election campaigns and more specifically the question to what extent campaign news coverage focuses on emotions and how such coverage influences voting behavior. It combines a media content analysis of the main private and public television channels, tabloid and broadsheet newspapers and the main online news sources in Germany of the 4 weeks leading up to the 2013 election with original two-wave panel survey data (N=1,008) assessing vote intentions and actual voting behavior before and after the campaign. Both of these methods employ an extensive set of newly developed measures, designed particularly for the purpose of this study, both to assess affective properties of news in media coverage as well as to measure emotions specifically towards particular politicians, political parties and political issues among voters. With detailed media exposure measures it is possible to connect the media content data with the panel survey data and given the panel design of the study it is possible to assess the impact of emotional news coverage on voting behavior and, more specifically, media effects on changes in vote intentions over the course of the campaign on the individual level.