New Parties on the News: How New(s) Media and New Parties Shape Attention and Electoral Support for Political Ideas

For democracy, a necessary condition is openness to new political ideas. New ideas are often advanced by new political parties. New parties must rely on media to communicate with the electorate.

In the process of that communication, it is inevitable that these media largely shape new parties’ public image.However, studies of new parties pay little attention to media.

Vice versa, studies of media pay little attention to new parties.As a result, we lack a full explanation of new party emergence. This hinders our understanding of the openness of democratic systems, and of their current renewal.

While Vox, M5S, and AfD experience unprecedented success, we hardly know1. how (much) news media cover new parties;2. what factors shape that coverage;3. how (much) that coverage facilitates new party emergence;4. how (much) social media use facilitates new party emergence.NEWNEWS addresses these questions by developing and testing an Integrative Framework of Political Party Gatekeeping.

It adds to the literature in terms of theory (‘bringing in’ media and voter perceptions) and methodology (experimental methods and data science).The project seizes new opportunities:-Thanks to cutting edge analytical models, it adequately tests causes and electoral effects of that coverage, taking into account agency of new parties and heterogeneity of news outlets and voters;-Thanks to recent data collection, it encompasses all national-level new parties in 19 countries since 1950 (instead of only successful ones);-Thanks to innovations in automated content analysis, it maps national-level coverage of these parties in various offline and online sources (instead of only newspapers).NEWNEWS will reveal media portrayals of new parties, how these portrayals vary, and how they matter for election outcomes.

This way, it will offer a novel theoretical framework, conceptualisations, operationalisations, data, and algorithms – and open up new lines of research on media and new voices.