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Durch die Medienlogiken erhalten spektakuläre Aktionen extremistischer Akteure hohe Resonanz, und von Parteien und Medien zugespitzte Konflikte und Skandale um die Grenzen des Extremismus und Radikalismus erschweren eine sachliche Debatte über potenziell demokratiegefährdende Phänomene. Linards Udris beleuchtet die Frage nach den unterschiedlich hohen Resonanzchancen des politischen Extremismus und Radikalismus in der öffentlichen Kommunikation der Deutschschweiz. In einer Längsschnittanalyse seit den 1960er Jahren werden Unterschiede zwischen verschiedenen Phasen und zwischen dem Links- und Rechtsextremismus hinsichtlich der Aufmerksamkeit und Legitimität anschlussfähiger Protest-Themen erklärt. Eine Vertiefungsanalyse zeigt, wie die Medialisierung der politischen Kommunikation die Resonanzchancen des Extremismus und Radikalismus und den Umgang mit diesen zu prägen vermag.

While there is growing interest in political crises in political communication research, crisis has not yet become a meaningful concept. Also, research tends to be reactive, which is suggested by an analysis of when and how the "crisis" label occurred in Swiss media from 2000 to 2018 and how recent scholarship examines political crises. This commentary gives an overview of different research areas within this fragmented "crisis" field and discusses a nuanced concept of crises that is more sensitive to the causes and dynamics of communicatively constructed crises on the macro level. It argues that a more systematic, more comparative and more macro-oriented research on political crises will help reduce the reactive nature of the field and enhance its public relevance.

Referendum campaigns, which happen in many countries on the national or sub-national level, are highly important and special periods of political communication. Unlike elections, however, referendum campaigns are understudied phenomena. This thematic issue addresses patterns of referendum campaigns, which increasingly take place in digital and hybrid media environments, where political actors conduct campaigns through various channels, news media react to and shape debates on social media, and citizens receive a large share of political information from traditional and digital media. In this editorial, we provide a short overview of how research on referendum campaigns has evolved and how it has started to shift its attention away from news coverage and toward the role of campaign actors and the citizens who use (or engage with) search engines and social media platforms. The articles in this thematic issue reflect this shift but also show that news media remain important actors in referendum campaigns. Finally, we outline further research steps, which should include even more holistic analyses of the hybridity of referendum campaigns and hopefully more comparisons across cases.

What are the patterns in media coverage in Swiss energy policy-making, and to what extent do the media influence voters' decisions at the ballot? In a first step, this chapter provides a comparative investigation of media coverage in the run-up to three recent energy-related referenda (2015 initiative "Energy tax instead of VAT"; 2016 nuclear phase-out initiative; 2017 referendum on the federal Energy Strategy 2050), with 31 other referenda between 2014 and 2018 as a benchmark. Based on a content analysis of articles published in 21 Swiss newspapers, our analysis demonstrates that the three energy-policy referenda are characterized by patterns similar to non-energy votes but also have distinct features. In a second step, we specifically focus on the 2016 nuclear phase-out initiative, which was characterized by balanced newspaper reporting, and explain voting behavior by linking data on media coverage and individual-level data from a panel survey (n=1014). The analysis relies on "linkage analysis", a method that takes media contents as quasi-experimental stimuli to explain individual-level outcomes. We find that the failure of the phase-out initiative can be partly explained by exposure to newspaper coverage: one in four left-wing voters who had initially been in favor of the popular initiative but were exposed to strongly negative coverage about it during the "hot" campaign phase changed their initial voting intention. The analysis also suggests that the media coverage may have helped center/right-wing voters to learn about their preferred party's position so as to align their vote choice with their political predisposition.

Die Diskussion um eine Stärkung der direktdemokratischen Elemente auf unterschiedlichen politischen Ebenen wird in den letzten Jahren intensiver geführt. Der Beitrag untersucht am Beispiel der Schweiz, wie intensiv und wie ausgewogen 22 verschiedene Printangebote über zur Abstimmung gelangte nationale Vorlagen zwischen 2014 und 2018 berichteten. Anhand verschiedener Indikatoren wird nachvolllzogen, inwieweit es in der Schweiz eine mediale Polarisierung der Berichterstattung zugunsten bestimmter politischer Lager gibt. Dabei gilt der Fokus den Massenmedien, da trotz der Veränderung im Mediengebrauch der Bevölkerung und vor allem der zunehmenden Bedeutung von Social Media-Angeboten auch in der Schweiz die massenmedialen Angebote noch eine wichtige Informationsquelle der Bevölkerung über Politik sind und ihnen ein Einflusspotential auf die Mobilisierung und Entscheidungsfindung zukommt.