The Media’s Say over What Politicians Do: A Comparative Experiment of the Media Influence on Politicians’ Behaviour

In recent years, many studies have abandoned the absolutistic view of politics being at the mercy of the media and have started to paint a more fine-grained picture of this reciprocal relationship. Building on findings from content analyses and surveys, the present study takes an experimental approach not commonly applied to studying elite behavior to disentangle how the media influence individual political actors. National-level politicians from Switzerland and the Netherlands judge fictional but realistic news reports embedded in a survey. For each report they indicate whether it would trigger them to take a political action. The study aims at providing insight as to what extent political system, party and individual-level political actor variables influence (intended) behavior by individual political actors. The factorial survey approach allows to put factors at each of those levels into perspective to see what does actually matter.