In recent decades, the number of floating voters is rising, especially in European democracies: an increasing number of voters change their loyalty from election to election, or within election campaigns, signalling rising party system instability. The wave of “Dutch volatility”, moreover, is exceptional in this case. This trend of electoral, voter, or campaign, volatility is mainly studied in relation to changes in the structure of electoral competition or voter emancipation. Surprisingly, attention to the role of the media has been scarce, which is why this topic is underdeveloped. Since we do know that media content affects voter turnout as well as vote choice, we expect media to also affect vote change. However, this has never been studied in an extensive way.
This paper aims to fill this gap by moving beyond current explanations of electoral volatility, incorporating the media in an extensive way. We use a combination of a panel survey and an extensive content analysis of the Dutch 2010 election campaign, combining newspaper articles with TV broadcasts, and look at the impact of media use as well as media content on electoral volatility. Following state-of-the-art political communication research we not only look at across-the-board effects, but also investigate differences between voters in the extent to which they are affected by the media. Preliminary results show that media effects on electoral volatility are moderated by political extremism and political cynicism: the more cynical and the more moderate voters are especially affected by media use and media content.
