Newspaper markets and municipal politics: how audience and congruence increase turnout in local elections

ABSTRACT

Media coverage of politics is widely considered essential to political participation. However, studies on local elections do not yet generally take the effect of the media environment into account. This article posits that the territorial fit between newspaper markets and municipal boundaries makes citizens’ exposure to locally relevant news more likely. We use fine-grained data on newspaper readership in order to assess the effect of the territorial structure of the newspaper market on turnout in municipal elections in Switzerland. The analysis shows that newspaper audience in a municipality and the congruence of newspaper markets with municipal territories both have substantial positive effects on levels of turnout in municipal elections. The findings suggest that future research on local political behavior should better acknowledge the influence of the media environment – which can be adequately measured by newspaper audience and congruence. Implications are that current structural changes in the media system bear threats to local democracy via the territorial upscaling of media markets.

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this text was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC in 2014. The authors would like to thank Elisabeth Gerber, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for thorough reading and constructive comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks go to Linards Udris from the Forschungsbereich Öffentlichkeit und Gesellschaft (fög) at the University of Zurich for invaluable help with the analysis of newspaper content data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Kübler is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Co-Director of the Centre for Democracy Studies at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on multilevel governance and democracy, urban politics and policy, as well as public policy and representative bureaucracy in Europe.

Christopher Goodman is a junior research fellow in the Centre for Democracy Studies at the University of Zurich. He has studied Political Science and Communication and holds a Master's degree from the University of Zurich. His research focuses on local elections in Switzerland and on evidence-based policy-making.

Notes

1 The selection of 408 metropolitan municipalities (roughly 17% of the overall number of municipalities in Switzerland) was operated mainly to reduce data collection efforts for the dependent variable (see below).

2 In one canton – Neuchâtel – the municipalities are free to choose between the direct election of the government by the citizens, or indirect election of the government by the municipal parliament (which is itself directly elected). However, none of the municipalities under scrutiny in this study is located in the canton of Neuchâtel.

3 Note that there were no cases in which municipal elections were held at the same day as national elections, which could have resulted in an increased turnout for municipal elections as well.

4 All municipalities considered in this study are located within one of the six metropolitan areas. For our calculation of congruence, we account for a metropolitan area’s overall importance for a newspaper because, for example, even if there are many readers of newspaper x in one municipality m, that newspaper might not focus on the respective local politics if its main reader share lies in another metropolitan area. However, if others or even adjacent municipalities within the same metropolitan area represent a sizeable share of the overall readership of newspaper x, it is more likely that newspaper x also focuses on news that is locally relevant to municipality m.

5 Circulation figures of newspapers are collected by media market studies every year in Switzerland. These studies use large representative samples of the resident population aged 14 and over and implement a mixed-method design (CATI, online and paper questionnaires) to collect data on media use and related topics. Data on the readership of newspapers includes not only printed editions, but also e-papers and online editions of each newspaper.

6 Unfortunately, due to a change of method implemented for the Swiss population census in 2010, data for education levels – known to influence interest in politics and thereby electoral turnout – is no longer available at the municipal level. However, given the strong impact of education on income in Switzerland (see Lévy et al. 1997), income is not only a measure for socio-economic status, but also a proxy for the level of education.

7 Separate tests showed that the effect or proportional rule is explained away by the dummy controlling for location in the Italian-speaking region of the country. Indeed, most of the municipalities in which proportional rule is used for municipal elections are located in the Lugano metropolitan area, which is itself located in the Italian-speaking region of the country. The proportional rule was thus dropped from all the models. The variable “Italian-speaking” captures effects of both culture and electoral rule.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was conducted in the framework of the National Centre for Competence in Research Challenges to Democracy in the twenty-first Century at the University of Zurich, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.