oa Nederlandse en Vlaamse politieke partijen in de krant en in de peilingen: een wederkerige relatie

Dutch and Flemish parties in the media and in the polls: assessing a mutual causal relationship

We address the question to what extent media visibility of political parties and standing in opinion polls influence each other. We look at various political parties in the Netherlands and Flanders during the past two decades. We hypothesize a positive influence from the one on the other, and pose the question to what extent this differs for parties with different characteristics. We conduct a computer-assisted content analysis of newspaper coverage and collect existing public opinion polls. We use a pooled time series analysis and tests of Granger causality. Results show that often a positive causal relationship between media coverage and opinion polls exists. Sometimes, however, the relationship is absent, or even contrary to expectations. Especially in the last years, Dutch parties at the extremes of the political spectrum profit from media visibility. In Flanders, the relationship only runs from polls to visibility, and not the other way around.