In recent years, scholarly attention for the interaction between journalists and politicians has grown considerable. Many of those studies estimate the impact of media on political activities, for example on parliamentary questions or debates. Most authors take an agenda setting perspective, testing to what extent attention for issues in media coverage affects attention for the same issues in parliament. Especially the question which factors moderate the presence and size of this influence has been key studies (see Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2006 for an overview). Import moderators are party characteristics (e.g. size, opposition versus government parties), issue characteristics (some issues are more vulnerable to agenda-setting effects) and time (increased influence of media on politics due to mediatization). Until now, other media content characteristics as possible moderating factors have hardly been taken into account (but see Thesen 2013).
In this paper, I test whether the level of conflict that is present in media coverage moderates political agenda setting effects. The main hypothesis here is higher levels of conflict framing will increase parliamentarians’ attention to the coverage on this issue and further inflates the size of the political agenda-setting effect.
The moderating effect is tested using an elaborate Dutch dataset. A sample of 15 percent of all frontpage articles of the NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant and de Telegraaf for the period 1995-2011 is coded for issue attention according to the issue categories employed in the comparative agenda setting project (N=+/-10,000) but also for the presence of generic frames such as conflict framing (). Additionally, samples of parliamentary questions (20%%, N=+/-7500) are coded in a similar way. Also legislative proposals and party manifestoes are coded for issue attention. Weekly level pooled time-series analysis will be used to assess the impact of media attention on parliamentary attention and the moderating role of conflict framing.
