Greater than the sum of its parts - Assessing the state of democracy by exploring the interactive contestation of democratic norms and values in Dutch and US Online News

Over a decade of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the escalating conflict in Gaza, have challenged democracies, fueling political polarisation, populism, illiberalism, and nationalism. Long-standing democracies like the United States of America (US) are found to have developed strong authoritarian tendencies, political extremism is gaining traction in general. Against this backdrop, we explore how democracy, i.e., democratic norms and values, are contested in online media coverage as a mirror of the political climate regarding democracy. News media play a crucial role in forming the view of democracies as (online) news can mirror, amplify, and communicatively construct political and societal issues, also affecting citizens’ democratic behaviour. Democracy has many facets and can mean very different things for different people. Empirical research about the crisis of democracy is often limited to one aspect of it, such as elections, liberal democracy, or deliberation, and rarely takes a more encompassing perspective. Assessing the whole instead of the sum of its parts would allow a deep understanding of democracy’s crisis, where it originates, and what could be done to increase its resilience more generally. To explore this complexity, we conduct a manual analysis of online news contents, drawing on claims analysis. The coding scheme accommodates the (1) claimant as the actor raising the claim; (2) the issue which is being talked about; (3) the position the claimant takes regarding the issue, usually positive, neutral/ambivalent, or negative; (4) the actor about whom the opinion is expressed; (5) the argument that is given for why this position is right. We look into 3 years of pandemic coverage (2020-2022) as a time of intense contestation of democracy, due to the unprecedented nature of the pandemic itself but also the political measures taken to tackle it. To understand the influence of different contexts, we compare two countries with very different political and media systems, and different political developments during and responses to the pandemic. The Netherlands (NL) and the United States of America (US). We analyse online news media coverage which is societally relevant because of its influence on what the public thinks about and how: our research is embedded in agenda-setting theory, positing that democracy contestation in the news influences how people think about democracy more generally. We analyse the four largest online news media sources per country as listed in the Reuters Digital News Media Report to capture the most dominant and influential public debates. For operationalizing ‘democracy’, we draw on the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) project’s expert questionnaire, splitting democracy into 5 distinct principles along which the analysis is organised: The electoral, liberal, deliberative, participatory, and egalitarian principle. Our results enhance the debate about democracy’s crisis by allowing an assessment of the bigger picture: To understand which aspect of democracy is in crisis and how different principles and different actors play together in striking the balance of democracy’s every day state.