The Interaction between Media Coverage and Parliamentary Questions - A Cross-National Comparison

The question 'who follows whom?' has intrigued many scholars that study the interaction between politicians and journalists. An increasing amount of studies has employed an agenda's perspective to tackle this question and has demonstrated that the influence of media on politics, as well as the reversed relationship, is a contingent one: presence and size depend on a whole range of factors, such as the issue at stake, the type of political activity studied and stage of the electoral cycle. Also country characteristics are argued to be of importance, but only few studies take more than one country into consideration. Vliegenthart and Walgrave (2011) show for Denmark and Belgium that opposition parties, when asking parliamentary questions, are more strongly affected by media coverage than government parties. Van Noije et al. (2008) demonstrate for a range of issues that the influence between media and parliament is mutual in the UK, while in the Netherlands media only affected parliament and not the other way around.

In this paper, we build upon those previous cross-national studies and look at the interaction between media coverage and parliamentary questions in five European countries: Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland. While the political system of those countries have a lot common, they also show significant differences, for example in the function of the parliamentary system. This offers the opportunity to test whether previous findings on the interaction between media and politics hold in varying political contexts.We rely on coding of newspapers (and radio broadcasts for Denmark) and parliamentary questions following the issue codings of the Comparative Agenda's Project. For all countries, we have data that cover considerable time spans in the period 1984-2011. We use pooled times series analysis to assess the mutual impact and also consider contingent factors as interaction terms in the models.