The Effect of Media Salience on Parliamentary Speech Behavior

Master Thesis at the University of Konstanz

Abtract

Research on the effects of media highlights the pivotal function of mass media as a transmitter between political actors and citizens. Mass media informs citizens about politics, but their reporting is subject to economic bias. This thesis contributes to the discussion of the influence of media on politicians’ behavior. More specifically, this thesis examines the effects of newspaper coverage on the speaking behavior of politicians in the German Bundestag in two distinct cases. Based on Proksch and Slapin’s (2012) model, I extend a formal model to capture the central transmitter function of mass media. Using a novel newspaper data set, I examine the effect of biased media coverage on politicians’ behavior in a moderation and a moderated mediation analysis. The nuclear accident in Fukushima and the Russian attack on Ukraine serve as exogenous shocks for the mediation analysis. The results of the moderation analysis show the hypothesized differences in the speakers’ selection of salient topics. However, the effect is not robust in the mediation analysis, where no differences and only a weak indirect effect are found.

Overview of the presented results.

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