LOGO

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?

Among other factors, public policy is influenced by the debates that take place in a policy subsystem. Discourse network analysis is a methodology for the empirical description of changes in policy debates over time and for drawing inferences on how political discourse works. The presentation introduces the methodological toolbox of discourse networks and its application to pre-Riester pension politics in Germany. Among other findings, there is one closed policy community until the mid-1990s while increasing polarization occurs between this community and a new advocacy coalition composed of financial-sector actors and employers' associations towards the end of the 1990s. These trends culminate in an erosion of the old coalition before major policy change takes place in 2001.