Dynamics of Campaign Reporting and Press-Party Parallelism: Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism and the Media System in Turkey

ABSTRACT

How do press-party parallelism dynamics unfold in media systems that experience competitive authoritarianism? We analyze the content of news coverage of political parties across four consecutive national election campaigns in Turkey (2002, 2007, 2011, and 2015) to track changes in press-party parallelism. We explore three dimensions of press-party parallelism in order to study its dynamics: visibility of political parties, the effective number of parties represented in newspapers, and lastly, favorability toward political parties. First, within each campaign cycle, as election day approaches, visibility of the incumbent party increases while the visibility of other parties tends to decline. Likewise, the incumbent party’s visibility increases across the four elections we study. Second, for all newspaper groups, the number of parties that receive favorable or unfavorable coverage declines over consecutive election terms. Third, the incumbent party is the only that gains in terms of positive coverage within and across each election campaign period. Taken together, we show evidence for press-party parallelism dynamics in a competitive authoritarian country.

KEYWORDS:

• press-party parallelism
• competitive authoritarianism
• election campaigns
• content-analysis
• Turkey

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2019 IAMCR annual conference. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, the editorial team, as well as Işık Özel and İbrahim Öker for providing valuable feedback that further improved this study. We are especially grateful to Ezgi Elçi for managing the content analysis project. We thank all of the coders who worked in the project. We would like to thank Alexander Burak Franklin for his diligent proofreading. Holli Semetko provided guidance and partial funding for the 2007 and 2011 election studies via the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. We would like to thank the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey for funding (#111K006) the project titled “A comparative analysis of News in the National Press During 2002, 2007, and 2011 campaign periods”. We would also like to thank Koç University for funding the 2015 campaign period data collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JFEO2Q.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JFEO2Q.

Supplementary Materials

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1765913.

Notes

1. If the formation of enclaves comes at the expense of conventional intermediaries (i.e., core media sectors) that would have allowed individuals to become exposed to ideas that they might not have actively sought out, enclave deliberation may run the risk polarizing the society (Sunstein, 2017).

2. To provide evidence for this argument, we present an additional finding in the Supplementary Information regarding the counter-claim that the dynamics of pro-governmental bias are driven by demand among the readers. Findings show that after the sale of newspapers to pro-government companies, their circulation shares tend to decline.

3. For further details of the report, see https://rsf.org/en/2019-rsf-press-freedom-index-glimmers-hope-amid-overall-decline-eastern-europe-and-central-asia.

4. The difference in the number of days was due to data availability and replicating our findings with only 67 days before each of the four elections (i.e., common days across four campaigns) does not change the results and the replications with these 67 days are presented in the Supplementary Information.

5. ENP was calculated using Laakso and Taagepera’s (1979) measurement. The formula for calculating ENP is:

$ENP=\frac{1}{{\sum }_{i=1}^n{p}_i^2}$

where n is the number of parties competing in elections and p is the vote share of each party in a given newspaper’s coverage of politics. For a micro-level analysis of press-party parallelism using the ENP measure, see Çarkoğlu and Yavuz (2010).

6. Note that 0 (neutral/mixed slant) was also included in ENP calculations in the denominator as part of the share of all political stories that are positive/negative.

7. Further details of this weighting procedure are presented in the Supplementary Information.

8. Since our focus here is on competitive authoritarianism, we refrain from further commenting on the larger question concerning the role of the media sector in competitive democracies. However, a similar framework of analysis using our measures should also prove useful in understanding how democracies evolve as a function of the media sector’s coverage of electoral politics. The full potential of our framework of analysis may be realized only with such a comparative evaluation of democracies in contrast to competitive authoritarian regimes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) [TOVAG, 111K006, 2012]; the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University; Koç University.

Notes on contributors

Kerem Yıldırım

Kerem Yıldırım (Ph.D. Koç University, Political Science, 2016) is a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research examines party-voter linkages, political party competition, redistribution, and political communication.

Lemi Baruh

Lemi Baruh, (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Visual Arts at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. Lemi Baruh’s research focuses on media technologies, political engagement, freedom of speech, identity, surveillance, and privacy.

Ali Çarkoğlu

Ali Çarkoğlu (Ph.D. State University of New York-Binghamton, 1994) is Professor of Political Science at Koç University, Istanbul. His research focus is on political behavior, voting, public opinion and party politics.