The News Media and Economic Voting in the 1998 German Bundestag Election

This study investigates the role of the news media in the economic voting process during the 1998 German Bundestag Election, by exploring how exposure to economic news in the mass media affects economic evaluations. The empirical results are based on a content analysis of a range of German news media outlets and on survey data from a two-wave panel survey. News media outlets differed noticeably in their representation of economic issues: private television newscasts portrayed the economy in a rather negative manner, whereas public television news shed a rather positive light on the nation’s economic condition. The survey data suggest that the depiction of the economy in public versus private newscasts affected respondents’ economic assessments: exposure to public television news yielded positive judgements about the national economic situation, whereas exposure to private television news resulted in negative evaluations of the national economy. Personal and national economic evaluations affected political attitudes towards the main incumbent party, but not towards the main opposition party. For people with a low level of news exposure, pocketbook as well as national economic concerns mattered for the formation of political attitudes towards the incumbent party, whereas only the latter mattered for those with high levels of news exposure. By contrast, people with high levels of news exposure only considered concerns about the national economy when judging the main incumbent party. Attitudes towards the two major parties significantly affected vote choice for both of these parties. Four main conclusions are drawn from these findings: (1) Exposure to economic information in different news outlets may have an indirect effect on vote choice. (2) Different sub-groups of the electorate, depending on the overall level of news exposure, attach different weighs to pocketbook versus national economic concerns in the formation of political attitudes. (3) The findings land support to the Incumbency Hypothesis and run counter to expectations raised by the Policy Hypothesis of economic voting. In the translation of economic evaluations into political attitudes, perceptions of parties’ economic competency are not considered. (4) The traditional economic voting model deriving from research in the US two-party system cannot be directly and indisputably applied to the German multi-party context. The main incumbent party is punished for a bad economy, but, unlike the US, the main opposition party is not automatically rewarded. These main conclusions should be taken into account in future research on the origins of economic evaluations and on advancements in economic voting theory in the context of multi-party democracy.