Struggling up the hill

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of three main forms of campaign communication on voter turnout in the 2013 German Federal Election – party contact, the news media’s political coverage and everyday political discussions. Our study is innovative in that it uses panel data to reduce the problems of endogeneity and examines the impact of each information source controlling for the other two. The results show that media exposure via broadsheet newspapers is the strongest stimulus to turnout, followed by parties’ mediated electioneering efforts. We also find that under certain conditions, exposure to information sources can also demobilize voters.