New Parties in the News: A Regression Discontinuity Approach to News Media Coverage of New Parties

In every democracy, new parties emerge every now and then. New parties need news media attention to survive. In order to get attention, obtaining representation in the national parliament may help. To what extent do new parties receive more (or more favorable) coverage once they have gained access to parliament? And do some types of parties benefit more than others?

We select a highly centralised country with a nation-wide identical, clear, almost time invariant and low effective electoral threshold, the Netherlands. First we select all Dutch parties first time on the ballot in the most important election type since 1945. In a next step we code the visibility, tone and various types of framing of each of these new parties in news media coverage during the period leading up to the following election. We then link these parties' success in entering their national parliament, or their failure to do so, to that coverage. As there have been around 170 parties first time on the ballot, dozens of which have ended up near the electoral threshold, our dataset lends itself to regression discontinuity estimation. Our results may further our understanding of the effect of a threshold on a democracy's openness to new political ideas.