Mediatized politics: A time-series analysis of the influence of politicians media statements on the political debate

Do the media dominate politics or the other way around? The many studies that have tried to answer this question have treated the media and politics as wholly separate venues of debate, and have not yielded an unequivocal answer. In an increasingly mediatized political landscape, however, the political debate has partly shifted from the legislature to the media. If politicians make statements in the media before parliament, politics becomes governed by the news cycle. This role of the media as a platform for debate by politicians has not been taken into account in the empirical studies of the relationship between media and politics. To study the mediatized political debate, I will determine the content of statements by politicians in the media and relate this to the general debate in the media in parliament. In order to identify speakers and the issues and frames in their statements in large amounts of documents I build upon the automatic Semantic Network Analysis methods developed and validated in my dissertation research. This allows me to use a data-intensive time series approach to empirically determine what the predictors of politicians? media statements are and what influence they have on the debate in the media and in the legislature. Determining the role of politicians media statements will help understand the nature of elite power over the public debate. If the primary influence of the media is through its role as a platform for politicians, then political actors still dominate the debate, even if they have to play the game by the logic of mediatization. If, on the other hand, journalists are able to set the agenda of this platform, then the media do indeed dominate the political debate. Resolving this question will shed new light on the functioning of the media and politics in modern democracies.