A number of studies have analyzed the appearances of political actors in the media. One of the strongest findings seems to be that parties and politicians in office get more coverage, the so-called ‘incumbency bonus’. However, most studies focus only on election campaigns and only a few cover longer periods of time. Furthermore, no research has so far looked at the temporal development of political actors’ news appearances from an agenda-setting perspective. Using a unique media data-set, measuring the visibility of political actors across issues and time (daily, from 1984 to 2003), we track the development of the ‘incumbency bonus’. The paper will compare the visibility of government and opposition parties over a twenty year period, investigating variations between: routine times and election periods; types of government (strength, colour); niche and mainstream parties; owned and unowned issues. The goal is to contribute to a better understanding of party differences in media visibility, and particularly how they relate to the process of mediatization as well as the dynamics of agenda-setting and issue competition.
