Majoritarian and consensual patterns in political news: A longitudinal British-Dutch study of expressions of media logic (2000-2020)

Abstract

Much of the mediatization literature argues that the increased occurrence of expressions of media logic in political news coverage is driven by supranational factors including marketization, and postulates that contextual factors such as the national democratic model can explain the marked variations between countries. However, the relationship between such structural conditions and the occurrence of media-content elements in news coverage remains underexplored. In response, we compare the incidences of seven content expressions of media logic across a classic majoritarian democracy (UK) and a classic consensual democracy (the Netherlands). Innovatively, we additionally incorporate the dynamic political constellation of the two national governments. Our logistical regression analysis of 1463 newspaper articles shows that, as expected, these content expressions of media logic occur more often under majoritarian than under consensual styles of government. Our results further reveal that the political constellation of national governments offers a more refined explanation for how coverage behaves than the less dynamic variable of adopted democratic model.