Media Ideology in Multiparty Systems: Validated Scores for 16 European Countries

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication

Abstract

For many topics in political science such as polarization, campaigning, or misinformation, the measurement of news media ideology is of central importance. However, for many countries, reliable and scaled media ideology scores are either limited in scope or entirely absent. In the absence of comprehensive media scores, scholars are often forced to create unstandardized ad-hoc ratings which do not translate across countries, or are forced to limit the scope of their analysis to focus only on select outlets for which basic ideological ratings may exist. This limitation is particularly evident outside of the United States context and, to-date, media ideology scores are primarily limited to one-dimensional space in two-party systems. To address this gap, we provide comprehensive, precise, and validated media ideology scores for sixteen European countries.

Centrally, we extend previous US-centric work to propose a general model of media ideology based on URL sharing by politicians with known ideology. The advantages of our approach over previous models are, first, its applicability to multi-party systems, and second, its platform-independence, i.e., it can be applied to any platform on which politicians post news links.

To estimate the ideology of media outlets in sixteen European countries (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, United Kingdom), we collected the Twitter and Facebook posts of all members of parliament between 2009 and 2022 (roughly 40 million posts in total). We extracted URLs and their respective web domains from all these social media posts and isolated news domains using validated classification tools. This allows us to derive an ideological estimate, along with a measure of uncertainty, for over 1,000 news organizations across the sixteen countries. To showcase the usefulness of these scores, we compute a “media polarization” score per country and compare it to country-level indices of societal polarization.

In presenting these scores we offer, first, reliable media ideology scores that can be used by researchers as part of single-country or cross-country analyses. Additionally, we provide a methodological roadmap which other scholars may wish to replicate when attempting to create media ideology scores in future projects in any country not currently covered by our data.

Authors

• Michael Heseltine, University of Oxford

• Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, GESIS Institute for the Social Sciences