Comparing the Democratic Performance of Media Content

Abstract

While the previous chapter was concerned with the structural performance of mass media, that is, how well media systems are designed to comply with democratic goals, Chapter 6 focuses on media content. Again, by means of a mostly inductive research strategy, I explore how the newspapers selected from ten countries perform with regard to the measures defined in Chapter 4. The empirical approach chosen in this chapter is very similar to the study of structural media performance in Chapter 5 although the order of the analyses is somewhat reversed. First, as in the previous chapter, factor analysis is used to find out whether the nine indicators for democratic media performance on the content level relate to each other as proposed in the conceptualization of the vertical and the horizontal media function. Because of the low number of countries, the units of analysis in Chapter 6 are always the 50 newspapers. For this reason, the second step is to test whether these newspapers’ fulfillment of the vertical and the horizontal function with regard to their news coverage significantly varies between countries or whether it merely depends on their outlet-specific characteristics. Both descriptive and regression analysis can help finding answers to this question. Finally, I study more comprehensively whether and what kind of patterns can be identified in terms of newspapers’ democratic performance on the content level. Scatter plots and cluster analysis give insight as to how the media functions interact and which configurations of the two can be observed across newspapers and especially across countries.