Place:
Zentrum für Sozialpolitik, Unicom
Room: 3380
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Time:
4:15 - 5:45 p.m.
Lecture Series:
Jour Fixe
Semester:
SoSe 2015

What role does the media play in forming economic perceptions and voting? Previous studies have suggested a variety of (sometimes conflicting) answers based on limited data -often no more than two sources (usually newspapers) - and a single country - usually the United States.
This paper introduces a large project designed to test the basic relationship between the media, partisanship, and voting cross-nationally. Having collected over 11.3 million relevant sentences from approximately 2 million articles related to the economy in 32 newspapers in 16 developed countries, we present preliminary results on three relationships:

  1. How well does newspaper sentiment reflect the economy?
  2. Do media reports mediate the economic vote? and
  3. Does media partisanship bias reporting on the economy?