The two-way effects of parties‘ issue attention and media salience: The case of the immigration issue during the refugee crisis

Especially in times of crisis and regarding ‘hot topics’, media reporting and parties’ agenda-setting efforts dynamically interact which each other. While parties will attempt to steer media reporting to issues beneficial to them, news outlets are simultaneously exposed to other stimuli, such as public opinion, external shocks/events, or other actors’ behavior . Additionally, parties differ in their leverage to shape media salience of issues, for instance when they act as issue owners. Bringing together scholarship on agenda-setting, party and issue competition as well as media theory, our study assesses when and under which circumstances parties manage to impose their issues on news outlets and when they are pressured to react to media reporting. We use a combination of text-as-data methods in order to acquire monthly measures of parties’ and media salience on the immigration issue, which we combine with social media and public opinion data. Our study focuses on the years 2013 to 2017 in Austria and Germany, a period which includes the so-called refugee crisis. Furthermore, our data structure allows for comparing ‘normal’ times with election campaigns, which we expect to differ in their ‘interaction-logic’. Our findings contribute to scholars’ understanding of party-media interactions as well as the role of challengers parties in modern democracies.