How Media Coverage of Politicians Shapes Public Interest in Them: Evidence from Five European Countries

Abstract: The media coverage of politicians has received substantial scholarly attention in the study of political communication. However, the consequences of media visibility for political information seeking among the public has not been the subject of much empirical research. Putting together an original dataset of nearly a million news stories from 15 national newspapers in Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK, the biographies of 2,500 members of parliament (MPs) from the period of 2005-2017, and internet search data (using the Google Trends) that document public interest in politicians, we examine the extent to which representatives’ media visibility affects their popularity on the internet on a monthly basis. Our results show that while politicians’ news visibility is positively associated with public interest in them, this association varies considerably by politicians’ sociodemographic and political characteristics. These results have important implications for democratic representation and political communication.

Author bio: Tevfik Murat Yildirim is associate professor of political science at University of Stavanger, Norway. His research focuses on political elites, gender and politics, and political representation, and has appeared in various journals including American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of European Public Policy, Political Behavior, among others.