The Bulgarian “Nuclear Referendum” of 2013 and the independence of the Bulgarian media

Abstract

This article analyses the media coverage of the 2013 Bulgarian “nuclear” referendum. We investigate the balance between Yes and No arguments on the construction of the Belene nuclear power plant, nuclear energy in general, and conducting a referendum on the nuclear issue. We also examine the quality of the reasons given and the frequency of government and ruling party sources. We find that the newspapers under examination voiced a diversity of viewpoints and sources. In light of recent assessments of the Bulgarian media, bias in media coverage of the referendum was not significant.

Keywords:

• referendum
• direct democracy
• media independence

Notes on contributor

Tanya Bagashka is an Associate Professor at the Political Science Department of the University of Houston. Her recent publications include “Unpacking Corruption: The Effect of Veto Players on State Capture and Bureaucratic Corruption”, published in Political Research Quarterly in 2013, “Risky Signals: The Political Costs of Exchange Rate Policy in Post-Communist Countries”, published in International Studies Quarterly in 2013, and “The Personal Vote and Economic Reform”, published in Electoral Studies in 2012.

Notes

1. Similar to Renwick and Lamb (2011), we are not interested in “full deliberation”, which implies participants engaging in deliberations together, a condition absent in media debates. We are mostly interested in whether the media provides voters with information necessary for informed choices.

2. A similar development, in particular, a rise in hidden advertising (the inability to distinguish between paid and regular coverage), was observed in Russia from 1995 on as well as in Moldova and Ukraine (see Oates 2007, 1289 and Nikolayenko 1998, 668).

3. One of those is New Bulgarian Media Group led by Irena Krasteva, which has expanded steadily in the past few years and today controls several newspapers and TV channels including the dailies Telegraf, Monitor, and Politika. The other major media group is Media Group Bulgaria Holding, which publishes major newspapers such as Trud, 24 Hours, and 168 Hours.

4. According to the explanatory memorandum for the referendum, a vote “Yes” indicates that the voter is for the construction of a new NPP in the Republic of Bulgaria. A vote “No” indicates that the voter is against the construction of a new NPP in the Republic of Bulgaria. According to article 1.53 of the amendments to the “Safe Use of Nuclear Energy Act”, a nuclear power plant is a power plant, where energy is generated by one or more nuclear reactors, which may include the equipment for the management of nuclear waste and the produced nuclear energy located in an area with provided general physical safety and emergency planning.

5. On 24 October, a majority of lawmakers voted in favour of the edited question.

6. We conducted Z-tests for population proportion where the sample size was large enough. In the cases where np or n(1−p) < 10, where n stands for the number of cases and p stands for the number of successes, we used a binomial probability small-sample test for population proportion. The results presented in the text are for two-tailed tests.

7. For both Standart and Trud, the null hypothesis that the proportion of pro-statements in the population is 0.5 is rejected at the 0.05 significance level.

8. Renwick and Lamb (2013) use the coding category “Incomplete reason” for statements that contain a reason, but that do not contain an argument as to how the opinion and the reason are linked. Since we identified many cases where the distinction between complete and complete justification was blurred and rather subjective, we code all statements that contain a reason as “Single Linkage” or “Multiple Linkage” depending on whether they contain single or multiple linkages respectively.

9. We also calculated the frequency of statements by members of the government, but have not presented those results here, because this percentage is very highly correlated with the percentage of statements by GERB members.

10. The widely used measures of media freedom have been criticised for being “more of a projection of a particular national tradition of the media (typically that of the USA) on media systems in countries around the world (see Oates 2007, 1279).

11. The low balance and quality of debate in Telegraf as well as the tendency to exclusively voice the opinions of members of the ruling party GERB would not surprise many observers of Bulgarian politics. Most of the New Bulgarian Media Group publications are financed through the Corporate Commercial Bank (CCB), which possesses significant assets of state-owned companies of the Ministry of the Economy, in addition to the assets of other state-owned companies. According to a media monitoring analysis of the Media Democracy Foundation, the media group of Delyan Peevski [Krasteva's son] was supporting three major parties – GERB, BSP, and MRF (Foundation Media Democracy 2012). The report further suggests that the leading line aims at legitimising GERB as the major party in power and BSP and MRF as the only alternatives to the governing party.

12. A model characterised by a strong party on the left and the right, which described well most of the Bulgarian post-communist transition where the BSP and the UDF were the dominant parties on the left and the right, respectively.