Patterns of stability and change in media attention in Europe

Abstract

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has evolved into a comprehensive theory of organisational information processing over the past two decades, with hundreds of studies adopting it to examine various aspects of the policy process. Despite the growing number of studies building on PET, however, our understanding of stability and change in media agendas remains rather limited. I propose a theory that seeks to explain the conditions under which media agendas are more punctuated and test my hypotheses using a dataset of 7 million news stories from 15 newspapers in Belgium, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK between 2000 and 2019. Results, based on an analysis of change distributions and a series of regression models, highlight two important findings: first, punctuations in the media agenda are less severe and frequent than those in other organisational agendas. Second, the severity of punctuations is greater in politicised news and diminished in issue areas related to ‘core functions of government’ (Jennings et al, 2011), relative to non-politicised news and issues outside the core areas, respectively. Results also suggest that despite the varying media and political characteristics of the countries examined in this study, change distributions of media attention are strikingly similar across the country cases. Through this novel and innovative study, the article contributes to PET theory by considering different elements of news stories, as well as re-engaging with the discussion of the relationship between the media and politics.