Election coverage is often assumed to be different to everyday political coverage. We argue that this assumption depends on political institutions. In majoritarian countries, where elections choose governments, election coverage should decisively move towards political competition and away from policy. In consensual countries, where coalitions are based on policy negotiations, there should be a less pronounced shift towards political competition and away from policy. To test this argument, we use an automatic coding system to study all coverage in Die Welt for twelve years (three elections) and in the Financial Times for thirty years (seven elections). This is a total of over 0.9 billion words. The results support our institutional hypothesis.
