Continuity and Change in Campaign Communication

In the second half of the 20th century, election campaigns changed substantially in Western countries, albeit with notable time-lags. Under the keyword "Americanization", comparative research attempted to provide international evidence of a fundamental transformation to campaign communication, first observed in the United States. In particular, the role of the media seems to have changed from being a mere channel of communication to becoming a major actor in the campaigning process, thus resulting in a permanent struggle of whether the media or the parties control the agendas of campaigns. However, empirical studies on the complex relationship between the media and political actors have provided mixed results, indicating the need for a broader look at the formation of campaign agendas and the importance of long-term research to consider both the dynamic process of this relationship and the context variables it depends on. Both suggestions will be met by the proposed project. It aims at investigating continuity and change in the roles of the news media and the political parties in Austrian campaign communication since 1966. Considering the main question of who controls the agenda of campaigns, the methodological approach is based on the concept of agenda-building as an extension of the agenda-setting model, dealing with the interaction of media and political actors. To assess changing characteristics, mutual influences and ongoing developments, a set of indicators related to the "Americanization" of campaign communication will be applied to the analysis both of news media coverage and party messages. Four indicators - personalization, a decrease of substantive issues, as well as an increase of negativity and of winning and losing as a central concern - refer to the salience of actors, issues and attributes (such as evaluations of policies, personal traits and horse-race standings). A fifth indicator widens the agenda-building perspective by emphasizing the possible consequences of these tendencies on the quality of discourse. To establish party and media agendas, a content analysis will be conducted of press releases, the main evening newscasts of the two Austrian broadcasters, as well as the election coverage of two quality papers and two major tabloids during the hot phase of the campaign. The analysis will cover all thirteen general elections held in Austria since 1966. Focusing on a well-defined period of forty years, the party-media relationship, culminating in the struggle for control over campaign agendas, can be examined as a dynamic process not only reflecting interconnected developments between both sides, but also depending on the changing structural characteristics of both the party system and the media system. On the one hand, the political landscape in Austria has changed from a two-party system to a moderate - and recently somewhat polarized - pluralism. On the other hand, the media system has seen the rise and decline of a monopolistic public server broadcaster as a mainstream medium, accompanied by the vanishing of the party press, steadily increasing press concentration and, consequently, the emergence of giant media corporations favouring tendencies towards a more powerful role of the media.

This project aimed to investigate continuity and change in the roles played by the news media and political parties in Austrian campaign communication over the last four decades. During this time period, the political landscape in Austria has changed from a de-facto two-party system to moderate pluralism, creating a more flexible electorate with voter behavior no longer determined by traditional cleavages. On the other hand, the media system has seen the rise and decline of a monopolistic public service broadcaster as a mainstream medium, and this has been accompanied by the vanishing of the party press and steadily increasing press concentration. In the last few years, both the introduction of private broadcasters and the increase in the market share of free dailies have intensified competition in both sectors of the media industry. To examine changes in the party-media relationship, the project team carried out a comparative analysis of press releases of all parliamentary parties and of media coverage based on the evening newscasts of all television stations and the political sections of all supraregional newspapers. To assess changing characteristics, mutual influences, and ongoing developments, a set of indicators related to the mediatization of election campaigns has been applied to the analysis of both news media coverage and party messages. Considering the main indicator of who controls the agenda of campaigns, the results of our analysis show that the first phase, which sees the media mainly as transmitters of party agendas, was followed by an overlapping period of a press-party-dealignment, reaching its peak in the 1980s. In the following decade, the parties managed to become the driving forces behind the overall agenda dynamics by adapting to the rules and norms of journalism. However, in recent times, a more competitive media system has led to a more powerful role for the media, manifesting itself in a more selective approach to the coverage of political issues and, for the first time, in influences on various parties agendas. Similar non-linear, but ongoing processes of change are revealed by indicators such as horse-race coverage, sound-bite communication, negativity, and personalization of politics.These analyses were accompanied by a cross-national comparison of election coverage in elite Austrian and German newspapers in order to identify structural and situational factors that may have had a major impact on this coverage, and by a qualitative analysis of party and media discourse intended to assess the quality of political discourse, which can be considered essential to a deliberative democracy. While the overall quality of political discourse remains roughly the same over the years (with an increase both in the reasoning within arguments and in offering solutions, and a decrease in the number of expressions of disrespect), the quality of party discourse was determined to be twice the level of that in the media discourse, with the lowest quality being evident in those articles conveying a journalistic perspective (and not the perspective of political actors).All strands of this project have yielded conceptual and methodological developments. These include the adaptation of time-series cross-section analysis to the study of agenda setting processes, the formulation of an empirically saturated model of factors influencing campaign coverage, and the construction of an index of quality of understanding useful in the analysis of deliberative aspects of political discourse.