Suchergebnisse

Recent trends in election campaigns in Belgium & the Netherlands are compared from both political & historical perspective; it is stressed that primary reference is made to Flanders, & only occasionally to Wallonia, when the political landscape of Belgium is discussed. Developments since the 1960s in both countries are examined, identifying similarities & differences across the following areas: (1) the consociational democracy of Belgium & the Netherlands & its erosion with the formation of new political parties, growing polarization, & negative campaigning, (2) the election system & rules; the structure of parliamentary democracy in the two countries & its reflection in election campaigns; the voter's choices & influence on the composition of both houses of the parliament & the office of prime minister, (3) the content & form of election campaigns; campaign financing, presence in the traditional & new media; free TV time, (4) what is the campaign about & for whom is the vote cast? the principal role played by the party's first candidate on the list, (5) the election rules of the prime minister & new government formation; the role of party leadership. It is concluded that Belgium & the Netherlands still share some characteristics of consensus democracies, however, developments since the 1960s, in particular the growing division between the Flemish & French-speaking regions of Belgium, led to significant institutional changes in the latter country's election campaigns & its citizen's declining interest in this political process on both federal & regional levels. Election campaigns in the Netherlands seem to be more concrete & relevant to the voter. However, both countries suffer from voters' losing direct control over who is elected & over the composition of their future government. Z. Dubiel

Abstract
Can an election campaign be considered a normal time period, or is it a very exceptional episode in the way the media look at political actors and issues? This is the central question of this article. We claim that during campaigns (political) journalists work under different (legal) conditions and are confronted with politicians and parties that are more active than ever, and with a public that pays more attention to who and how politics is presented. This general claim is made concrete in several hypotheses that are tested on the basis of a large dataset of Flemish news broadcasts between 2003 and 2006. Our results confirm that campaign periods strongly influence the amount, style and actors of the (political) news in Belgium (Flanders).

There seems a growing consensus on the personalisation of politics, meaning that not parties but more and more individual politicians have become the central actors in politics. The media, and especially television, are given a prominent role in this tendency towards 'candidate centred politics'. In this article we discuss the role of newspapers in this regard. Is there a more personalised and less party political way of reporting in the written press ? On the basis of a longitudinal study (1958-1999) of two Flemish newspapers we found only a modest and gradual tendency towards a personalisation of politics. Political parties have not been removed to the backstage of political reporting and remain a dominant player in the written press.

There seems to be a growing consensus on the personalization of politics, meaning that not parties but individual politicians have increasingly become the central actors in politics. The media, especially TV, are given a prominent role in this tendency toward 'candidate-centered politics'. In this article we discuss the role of newspapers in this regard. Is there a more personalized & less party political way of reporting in the written press? On the basis of a longitudinal study (1958-1999) of two Flemish newspapers, we found only a modest & gradual tendency toward a personalization of politics. Political parties have not been removed to the backstage of political reporting & remain a dominant player in the written press. 6 Tables, 1 Figure. Adapted from the source document.

Online disinformation is considered a major challenge for modern democracies. It is widely understood as misleading content produced to generate profits, pursue political goals, or maliciously deceive. Our starting point is the assumption that some countries are more resilient to online disinformation than others. To understand what conditions influence this resilience, we choose a comparative cross-national approach. In the first step, we develop a theoretical framework that presents these country conditions as theoretical dimensions. In the second step, we translate the dimensions into quantifiable indicators that allow us to measure their significance on a comparative cross-country basis. In the third part of the study, we empirically examine eighteen Western democracies. A cluster analysis yields three country groups: one group with high resilience to online disinformation (including the Northern European systems, for instance) and two country groups with low resilience (including the polarized Southern European countries and the United States). In the final part, we discuss the heuristic value of the framework for comparative political communication research in the age of information pollution.

Studies have shown that parties selectively emphasize different issues to compete with each other to raise the salience for their preferred issues and to appear competent in handling them. This study applies the selective emphasis framework to individual politicians. We argue that politicians compete with both politicians from different parties and with their party members. We expect that issue ownership matters to competition with politicians from different parties and issue specialization to competition with politicians from their own party. We studied the individual issue agendas of 144 Belgian politicians for a period of 9 months on Twitter, in the news and in parliament. Our results show that issue specialization is a consistent driver of the three issue agendas of politicians, while the effect of issue ownership varies across agendas. This means that both factors are not mutually exclusive and that combining them can be an opportune strategy for politicians.

Intermedia agenda setting is a widely used theory to explain how content transfers between news media. The recent digitalization wave, however, challenges some of its basic presuppositions. We discuss three assumptions that cannot be applied to online and social media unconditionally: one, that media agendas should be measured on an issue level; two, that fixed time lags suffice to understand overlap in media content; and three, that media can be considered homogeneous entities. To address these challenges, we propose a "news story" approach as an alternative way of mapping how news spreads through the media. We compare this with a "traditional" analysis of time-series data. In addition, we differentiate between three groups of actors that use Twitter. For these purposes, we study online and offline media alike, applying both measurement methods to the 2014 Belgium election campaign. Overall, we find that online media outlets strongly affect other media that publish less often. Yet, our news story analysis emphasizes the need to look beyond publication schemes. "Slow" newspapers, for example, often precede other media's coverage. Underlining the necessity to distinguish between Twitter users, we find that media actors on Twitter have vastly more agenda-setting influence than other actors do.