The determinants of the media coverage of politicians: The role of parliamentary activities

Abstract

AbstractA large strand of scholarly inquiry has built on the assumption that being active in legislatures helps further representatives’ career prospects by enhancing their media and public visibility. Previous studies suggest some visibility‐boosting effects of parliamentary work, but results vary considerably across political settings and research designs. Moreover, there is little research on the extent to which the visibility‐boosting effect of being active in parliament varies across representatives. Specifically, do legislators with high news value benefit more from legislative speechmaking, or can other representatives make up for lower news value by taking the parliamentary floor? We believe that this lack of focus on the conditional nature of the link between political work and media visibility restricts our understanding of the consequences of political work. This study therefore presents a unique combination of data covering nearly 600,000 news appearances and 850,000 parliamentary speeches of members of parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom (2000–2015) and Norway (2000–2016) to examine the link between legislative speechmaking and the news visibility of legislators. Our results suggest that the media appearances of representatives in the United Kingdom and Norway are associated positively with the number of legislative speeches representatives make and that this positive association between speechmaking and media visibility is differential across groups of representatives, with senior MPs and government party MPs benefiting more from being active on the parliamentary floor.