Media effects on preferential voting

The effect of candidate traits in open and flexible PR systems have recently attracted academic attention (van Erkel and Thijssen 2016; Marcinkiewicz and Stegmaier 2015) and the preferential voting has been perceived as a sign of personalization of politics (Elmelund-Praestekaer and Hopmann 2012; Wauters et al. 2018). It has been proposed that personalization of politics has led to the decline of preferential votes for the candidates other than party leaders due to ‘centralized’ personalization of politics (Wauters et al. 2018). Changes in the media consumption and increasing role of TV have been driving personalization of politics and consequently the use of preferential votes by voters (Elmelund-Praestekaer and Hopmann 2012). In order to analyze the long-term media effects on preferential voting, we use the preferential voting data from six parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic held between 2002 and 2021 combined with data on media presence of candidates in various media types (TV, radio, print and online). The level of preferential voting for candidates on different ballot positions remains rather stable over the 20 year-long period. In addition, the higher media exposure is indeed associated with higher number of preferential votes. However, when media types are distinguished, the presence of candidates in TV does not have a significant positive effect on preferential votes unlike other types of media such as print newspaper and online media.