Decidability, the degree to which the parties’ political offer is distinguishable, is the major dimension on the supply side of electoral competition (Bartolini 2000) and a prerequisite of political representation. Moreover, a diverse political offer is not only normatively important, but research also found that it affects the calculus of voting (Lachat 2011). However, most of the research on decidability has two shortcomings: First, despite a change from ideology- to issue-based competition (Green-Pedersen 2007), decidability is often understood as polarization measured on a single ideological left-right dimension. Second, despite an increasing importance of mass media as the principal source information for most citizens, research on the supply side of politics mainly focused on electoral programs as measures of parties’ programmatic profiles. This research simply assumed that the content of the electoral programs is transmitted to the citizens via the mass media. This study tests this assumption by comparing the content of electoral programs with election news coverage of mass media. By analyzing the emphases on twelve issues, it goes beyond general left-right positions. The dependent variable is conceptualized in a dyadic way (party-media combinations) as the degree of correspondence/ bias between the coverage of a media outlet about a specific party compared to the party’s statements in its electoral program. Independent variables are located on two levels of analyses: the macro level with different types of party and media systems and the meso level with different types of mass media and political parties. Methodologically, the study applies multi-level modeling to content analytical data from election news coverage and electoral programs provided by the PIREDEU project for the European elections 2009. The dataset contains data on the electoral programs for all major parties as well as news coverage from five media outlets per country for all EU countries.
