Does Commercialized Political Coverage Undermine Political Trust?: Evidence Across European Countries

Abstract

Media commercialization has long been suspected of exerting a negative influence upon political culture. The news media's interest in intrigues, personal details, and scandals rather than political issues in order to capture audience attention is regarded by many as a prime source of political cynicism. This article scrutinizes this claim by examining whether a commercialized media environment correlates with lower levels of citizen political trust across countries. Integrating cross-national survey data with country-level measures of commercialized political coverage, the findings indicate that, across 33 European countries, a negative link exists between media commercialization and political trust. Replication of the analysis with a separate cross-national survey across 28 countries demonstrated the robustness of the findings. These support the claim that media commercialization undermines political trust.

Notes

Notes

¹ For a different view regarding media effects, see Newton (2006) and Norris (2000).

² European Values Study 2008: Integrated Dataset (EVS 2008) ZA 4800. For further methodological details, see http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/evs/surveys/survey-2008.html.

³ Studies examining political cynicism (e.g., Jebril et al., 2013; Schuck et al., 2013) employed more sophisticated scales that were unavailable in the cross-national surveys used here.

⁴ Multiple group confirmatory factors analysis across the 33 countries established metric invariance.

⁵ For details regarding the data collection and the indices' reliability tests, see http://www.mediasystemsineurope.org/.

⁶ For the data and further methodological issues, see http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=16.

⁷ Income and education being found to be insignificant, they were excluded from the analysis.

⁸ Political trust is the intercept for OLS regression in each of the 33 countries, controlling the individual-level variables included in Model 1. This enables the plot to better reflect political trust than simple usage of the aggregate country raw mean.

⁹ The effect of commercialization of political coverage index for Model 2 without Russia was −.098(.035)** and without Denmark −.073(.017)***.

¹⁰ For further methodological details, see the ESS Web site. Italy, Macedonia, Malta, Serbia, and the Republic of Moldova are not included in ESS 2010. For consistency with the time at which the EMSS 2010 and the EVS 2008 were conducted, Italy—which appears in ESS 2004—is not included in the analysis. The other four countries were not available in the ESS rounds. The overlap between the EVS 2008 and ESS 5 is evident in the strong correlation (.75***) of the aggregated dependent variable (political trust) across 28 countries.

¹¹ The ICC for political trust across the 28 countries is 24%.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gal Ariely

Gal Ariely (Ph.D., University of Haifa, Israel) is senior lecturer at the Department of Politics & Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests are democracy and national identity.