Abstract
Conventional wisdom holds that party leaders matter in democratic elections. As very few voters have direct contact with party leaders, media are voters’ primary source of information about these leaders and, thus, the likely origin of leader effects on party support. Our study focuses on these supposed electoral effects of the media coverage of party leaders. We examine the positive and negative effects of specific leadership images in Dutch newspapers on vote intentions. To this end, we combine an extensive automated content analysis of leadership images in the media with a panel data set, the Dutch 1Vandaag Opinion Panel (1VOP), consisting of more than fifty thousand unique respondents and 110 waves of interviews conducted between September 2006 and September 2012. The results confirm that media coverage of party leaders’ character traits affects voters: Positive mediated leadership images increase support for the leader’s party, while negative images decrease this support. However, this influence is not unconditional: During campaign periods, positive leadership images have a stronger effect, while negative images no longer have an impact on subsequent vote intentions.
Highlights
Since the media focus so heavily on leaders’ personalities—what they are doing and saying, and where they are in the “race”—it is natural that voters, as consumers of the media, are likely to focus heavily on party leaders when making their choice at the ballot box. (Bittner 2011: 92)In her book Platform or Personality? The Role of Party Leaders in Elections, Bittner (2011) argues that party leaders are important electoral forces in democratic elections
The success of party leaders is inherently tied to the mediated environment, in which media are voters’ primary source of political information
Negative leadership images no longer have a negative effect on subsequent vote intentions
Summary
Since the media focus so heavily on leaders’ personalities—what they are doing and saying, and where they are in the “race”—it is natural that voters, as consumers of the media, are likely to focus heavily on party leaders when making their choice at the ballot box. (Bittner 2011: 92)In her book Platform or Personality? The Role of Party Leaders in Elections, Bittner (2011) argues that party leaders are important electoral forces in democratic elections. Research shows that exposure to personalized news coverage increases the influence of perceptions of party leaders on the vote decision (ibid.), indicating that leader effects in general are stronger during campaign periods than during routine times.
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