Media Effects on Political Leadership Evaluations. How Party Leader Images in Newspapers Affect Voter’s Leader Satisfaction

This paper examines if and how media portrayals of party leaders as having specific character traits affect citizens’ perception of political leaders. We study these effects based on evaluations on six leadership images in Dutch newspapers: political craftsmanship, vigorousness, integrity, responsiveness, consistency and communicative performances. First, we examine the effects of leadership images in the media on general leader satisfaction, measured by the 1VOP survey panel dataset (100.000 respondents and 100 waves, 2006-2012). Second, we study how these leadership images in newspapers affect leader satisfaction on specific leadership characteristics, based on an additional five-wave panel dataset conducted in the six months preceding the 2012 national elections (1500 respondent). Moreover, we aim to disentangle the mechanisms through which media coverage affects voters, focusing on the conditionality of the leadership effect based on campaign versus non-campaign periods and a variety of voter and leader characteristics.