How media coverage may have boosted Ukip’s levels of public support
Welcome to the latest in my occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. Today – how the media looks to have driven rather than reflected public opinion in the case of Ukip.
Increased media coverage of Ukip drove increased support for the party rather than following an increase that had already happened, the new research suggests.
This finding comes from Justin Murphy and Daniel Devine in, “Does Media Coverage Drive Public Support for UKIP or Does Public Support for UKIP Drive Media Coverage?” in the British Journal of Political Science.
They found that (with my added emphasis):
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.
This matches up with other, earlier research:
Seems like a good moment (@BBCr4today) to highlight that a substantial body of research identifies a link between news coverage, public opinion and voting behaviour.
— Will Jennings (@drjennings) August 2, 2018
In general terms, @claesdevreese et al find that media visibility and tone impact on vote choicehttps://t.co/4w8XqHyWqs
— Will Jennings (@drjennings) August 2, 2018
Research from the Netherlands by @rensvl and @boomgaardenhg show how news coverage of immigration increases support for anti-immigrant parties, even when controlling for real-world developments.https://t.co/YdKtXxOmHl
— Will Jennings (@drjennings) August 2, 2018
They also show how news content influenced anti-immigrant attitudes in Germany between 1993 and 2005 @EJPRjournal https://t.co/wxCnvHQ5bM
— Will Jennings (@drjennings) August 2, 2018
…and with Lauren McLaren they show that press emphasis of particular aspects of immigration appear to increase public concern about immigration in the UK https://t.co/WXy0pivIrx
— Will Jennings (@drjennings) August 2, 2018
Hat-tip: Tim Bale.
You can read the other posts in the Evidence-based campaigning: what the academic research says series here.
Am I missing something here, isn’t it a given that media coverage increases support for all parties, in fact don’t all parties spend most of the money, time and effort to get media exposure for their ‘ideas of the day’.