‘What’s on the news today?’ How newspaper coverage influences satisfaction with democracy in the United Kingdom: A topic modelling approach using Twitter Data"

How does citizens’ exposure to newspaper coverage affect their satisfaction with democratic life? The effect of media coverage on citizens’ satisfaction with the functioning of their democracy has long been at the centre of discussions concerning the role of media in shaping public opinion. However, few studies have been able to link variation in coverage to the evolution of citizen attitudes at the individual level. To address this research question, we scrape 1.5 million tweets from UK newspapers and apply a topic modelling algorithm to identify the topics and sentiment prevalent in the different news outlets. We then match our results to individual-level daily tracking data on satisfaction with democracy in the UK that we collected in partnership with YouGov from November 2019 to December 2021, matching respondent newspaper readership on each day, to the daily salience and sentiment of news coverage from that source. Our initial findings suggest that newspaper coverage does play a role in shaping public evaluations of democratic functioning.