Partisanship, Media Attention and Welfare Reforms. Why Media Reporting on Welfare State Has a Partisan Bias

The mass media is conventionally assumed to play an important role in welfare state politics. So far, however, we have very little systematic theorizing or empirical evidence on when and how the mass media report on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, we develop a set of hypotheses about mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. Drawing on a new dataset that includes around 4,800 news articles in British, Danish and German quality newspapers from 1995-2014, we find supporting empirical evidence for our expectations. These results have consequences for our understanding of welfare reform and the strategies, parties may employ.