Who Won the Election? Explaining Media Coverage of Election Results in Multi-Party Systems

Pundits and scholars alike often interpret election results by identifying parties who “won” and those who “lost” the election. Yet, as an increasing body of literature points out, identifying “winners” and “losers” in multi-party systems is often not clear: is the party winning most votes an election winner even if it lost electoral support compared to the last election? And are parties “winning” if they increased their electoral support since the last election, but fall short of the benchmark set by opinion polls before election day? Lastly, are media biased against mainstream and centrist parties? This paper investigates how media report about election results in the aftermath of the 2019 European Parliament elections, which is an important empirical contribution as existing research mostly focusses on campaign periods prior to Election Day. The paper relies on manual content analysis of four major newspapers, including broadsheets and tabloids, in Western and Central and Eastern European member states. These elections provide an excellent opportunity to compare media coverage across media and political systems, while holding time and the wider EU context constant. In the empirical analysis we test whether 1) a party’s status as the largest party, 2) changes in electoral support, 3) political affiliations of newspapers, and 4) ideological extremism affect whether newspapers portrait parties and politicians as “winners” or “losers”. The results have important implications not least because media reporting of “winning” and “losing” is likely to have consequences for a party’s continuing popularity and its legitimacy to enter government.