Abstract
AbstractAn extensive body of research documents how governing parties generally suffer electoral defeats. Varying explanations have been offered, most of which touch upon the liabilities of policy responsibility. Although media coverage is generally acknowledged as one of these liabilities, few empirical studies have examined how news content affect government support. Based on the fact that voters get their information about politics, policies and societal issues from the media, this article studies how the constant stream of negative news influences incumbent support over a 20‐year period in Denmark. Modeling a previously untested argument on the cost of ruling, it shows that the accumulation of bad news throughout tenure exerts a substantial effect on government support.
Highlights
In one of the early examinations of the electoral fortunes of incumbents, Rose and Mackie (1983) begin with a simple question: Are winners losers? Their own comprehensive and comparative analyses provide a clear answer, revealing how incumbency is more likely to be a liability than an asset
We argue that a constant stream of negative news images causes an increasing congestion of ‘bad memories’ that is an important driver of the cost of ruling
European Journal of Political Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research
Summary
In one of the early examinations of the electoral fortunes of incumbents, Rose and Mackie (1983) begin with a simple question: Are winners losers? Their own comprehensive and comparative analyses provide a clear answer, revealing how incumbency is more likely to be a liability than an asset. If the amount and tone of news should contribute to explaining the steadily increasing vote loss of governments during tenure, it would require that the dominance of negative over positive news is relatively stable over time Should this be the case and given that news is stored in voter memory (Green & Jennings 2016: 138–139), the result is that the asymmetry increases steadily during tenure. When studying the cost of ruling, we are dealing with phenomena that are unusually invariant: governments lose support and negative news outweighs positive news This results in closely matching trends, which complicates the attempts at causal modelling; applying an error correction model where the dependent variable has been first-differenced alleviates these concerns. In line with most applications of the error correction model, we do not difference the dummy variables discussed above
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