Building Policy Images in the News: The Ability of the German Federal Constitutional Court to Shape the Media Agenda

To what extent is the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) able to shape the interpretation of its own decisions by the media? This question has major implications for the legitimacy of the institution and its capacity to mobilize public support. The GFCC decisions are rather long and complex. Therefore, the public relies almost exclusively on the media to gather information about court rulings. However, newspaper articles potentially frame the legal arguments made by the court in a wrong way. A major tool for the GFCC to influence media coverage is to promote it’s by publishing press releases. In doing so the Court subsidizes information and provides the media with an interpretation of the ruling at stake, thereby trying to build a policy image. To analyze the ability of the Court to shape the news agenda it is not sufficient to focus only on whether a press releases is published; but it is also necessary to analyze the content and wording of the press release and how these are reflected in the news. The Court is influential in shaping the news agenda if his formulations and interpretation are borrowed by the media. Based on a theoretical framework linking the literature on agenda building and judicial politics, this study focus on the comparison between decision press releases of the GFCC (approx. 350 GFCC PMs) with articles about these decisions in two major German newspapers from 2013 to 2017. To measure if the media borrows the formulation of the Court and therefore to quantify the influence of the GFCC on the media agenda, this study will use text alignment methods. Additional factor who possibly influence the media power of the GFCC – the intra-institutional structure of the court, the complexity of the issue, and attention of by political parties and so on – will be considered within the analysis.