Does Media Coverage Drive Public Support for UKIP or Does Public Support for UKIP Drive Media Coverage?

Justin Murphy,Daniel Devine

doi:10.1017/s0007123418000145

Abstract

AbstractPrevious research suggests media attention may increase support for populist right-wing parties, but extant evidence is mostly limited to proportional representation systems in which such an effect would be most likely. At the same time, in the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, an ongoing political and regulatory debate revolves around whether the media give disproportionate coverage to the populist right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP). This study uses a mixed-methods research design to investigate the causal dynamics of UKIP support and media coverage as an especially valuable case. Vector autoregression, using monthly, aggregate time-series data from January 2004 to April 2017, provides new evidence consistent with a model in which media coverage drives party support, but not vice versa. The article identifies key periods in which stagnating or declining support for UKIP is followed by increases in media coverage and subsequent increases in public support. The findings show that media coverage may drive public support for right-wing populist parties in a substantively non-trivial fashion that is irreducible to previous levels of public support, even in a national institutional environment least supportive of such an effect. The findings have implications for political debates in the UK and potentially other liberal democracies.

Highlights

If a political party’s visibility in the media shapes the public support it receives, the media attention given to different political parties can have significant implications for democracy
This study has made three contributions. To our knowledge this is one of the first articles to study the dynamics of right-wing populist party support and quantity of media coverage in the context of a majoritarian system and the UK in particular; previous research has primarily focused on other West European democracies such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany
Despite the change in political system, this study has shown quantitative and qualitative evidence that media coverage may have played a unique causal role in increasing support for UK Independence Party (UKIP), in a fashion irreducible to previous levels of support or election outcomes

Summary

Introduction

If a political party’s visibility in the media shapes the public support it receives, the media attention given to different political parties can have significant implications for democracy. To conclude the main analysis, the VAR results suggest clear but imperfect and, for reasons discussed above, inherently limited evidence for Hypothesis 1 that increases in media coverage lead to increases in public support.

Results

Conclusion