Tabloidization of the Political Discourse

Voters get (most of) their information on politics via the media. Hence, political parties want to be favorably displayed by the media for strategic aims; for instance to increase their vote share. A recent experiment with journalists demonstrates that particular characteristics of an event determining its newsworthiness, so-called news values make press releases issued by political parties more likely to be published: the news values power elite, unexpectedness and magnitude. These news values resonate well with the messages populists disseminate. While scholars of populism have demonstrated that (in certain circumstances) the successful strategies of populist parties have a spill-over effect on other parties’ electoral programs, the claim that populists’ rhetoric is ‘contagious’, which, in turn, lead to a “tabloidization of the political discourse”, is untested. We empirically test this claim by investigating whether tabloid-like simplistic and sentimental language has a higher chance of receiving media attention (H1) and hypothesize when parties are likely to be ‘contaminated’. We focus on parties’ electoral performance (H2) and whether or not parties are in office (H3). To test our hypotheses, we created an innovative dataset with issued press releases of political parties, media content of the 5 main newspapers and party’s performance in the Netherlands between 2008 and 2014.