The media influence on policy agendas in Hungary: Studying the effect of regime hybridization

The role of media in influencing policy agenda has been subject of several studies, mostly in the US and Western Europe. The general finding is that it is difficult to capture the influence of the media agenda on policy decisions, but it has an effect on the symbolic policy agenda. However, very few research has addressed the problem in the context of the newer democracies of East and Central Europe. Previous studies on Hungary, focusing on the illiberal Orbán government, suggest that the media have no role in setting the policy agenda, and even the latter may drive the former. Our paper is the first attempt to draw a general picture of this disputed relationship in a non-Western context. Using media and interpellation data from the Hungarian Policy Agendas Project we investigate their relationship for the years 1990-2018, that is, the almost entirety of the democratic period since the regime change. The concept of Granger Causality is applied. While controlling for government cycle effects, public policy major topics are analysed separately in order to find existing uni- or multidirectional causal relationships. The hypothesis is that the hybridization of Hungarian politics that started in 2010 weakens the role of the media in influencing policy agendas since illiberal governance is less responsive to the thematisation of the media. We also study the phenomenon of parallelism and its role in the media – policy agendas nexus. Parallelism means that the media system is polarized and divided along political lines. We assume that parallelism has increased since 2010 which is reflected in the media agendas meaning that the thematic overlap between media agendas of outlets associated with different political sides has been decreasing. Previous studies on the Spanish media agenda demonstrated that there might be a systemic difference between politically aligned media outlets in terms of the policy topics they thematise more under different governments. We will study the phenomenon on the Hungarian data. We argue that the increasing parallelism of the media system affects not only the public sphere, but also the role of the media in influencing policy agendas. Growing parallelism probably contribute to the weakening of the media effect on policy agendas, which is not only relevant from a policy point of view, but as a sign of decreasing accountability raises concerns about the quality of democracy as well.