Negativity in the news and electoral behavior between first- and second-order elections

Abstract

Abstract The effects of news coverage on political attitudes in election campaigns have been widely studied in academic research. In particular, a fertile branch of the literature investigated the impact of news media negativity on turnout. To date, however, findings are mixed, precluding to state a clear relationship. This paper aims to shed a light on this topic by testing whether negative coverage may affect voters' turnout and to what extent. It approaches this research question by accounting for two different dimensions, controlling whether the interplay of media negativity (press and TV coverage) with the type of election (first- vs. second-order elections) has an impact on citizens' propensity to turnout. We test our hypotheses by taking Italy as a case study because it offers a combination of systemic and media characteristics that allows addressing properly the topic. We rely on four datasets covering the 2018 Italian general elections and the 2019 European Parliament Elections in Italy, respectively, with opinion data (2018 ITANES survey and 2019 ITANES-University of Milan survey) and two datasets measuring media negativity by means of a human content analysis carried out on media coverage during the 7 weeks before the election days (2018 and 2019 ITEM data). Our findings show that individual exposure to negative coverage leads to an increase in turnout mainly to the detriment of indecision. This pattern holds both in first- and second-order elections.