Media framing effects on voter perceptions of election winners and losers

Research shows that voters hold different views about the supposed winners and losers of an election: election winners might be those who finished in first place or parties that gained votes compared to the last election. Moreover, subjective factors such as partisan preferences affect how they perceive the election results. In this paper, we study the influence of media framing on citizens’ perceptions of election winners and losers. We argue that such media framing affects whether voters perceive a party as an election winner or loser. We test this expectation based on two pre-registered studies: first, a survey experiment with randomized news frames of an otherwise identical election result and second, a two-wave (pre-post) survey and media content analysis in the context of the 2021 German election. Preliminary results from the experiment suggest that positive (negative) framing of election results influences voter perceptions of winners (losers). The results also corroborate our expectation that respondents are more likely to identify parties as election winners (losers) if they like (dislike) the respective party. Yet, we find no evidence for our expectation that framing effects are strongest for voters with a moderate level of party sympathy; positive (negative) framing effects tend to be strongest among respondents who like (dislike) the respective party. Our second study, which is still being finalised, additionally allows assessing the extent to which voters perceive certain parties as legitimate or not. Our findings have wider implications for political representation, polarization, and the electoral linkage of citizens and their representatives.