Press-party parallelism and polarization of news media during an election campaign: the case of the 2011 Turkish elections

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine press-party parallelism during the 2011 national elections in Turkey. The article reports findings from a content analysis of 9,127 news articles and editorial columns from fifteen newspapers regarding the trajectory of press-party parallelism over the course of the twelve-week national elections campaign period. We focus on two indicators of press-party parallelism: (1) respective "voice" given to the two leading parties, calculated as the ratio of news that quoted sources from the incumbent Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) to the leading opposition party Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) and (2) news articles' tones toward AKP and CHP. The newspapers that were content analyzed were first categorized into three groups based on survey data regarding the voting intentions of their readers: (1) a group of "conservative" newspapers whose readers intended to vote primarily for AKP, (2) a group of "mainstream broadsheets," and (3) a group of "opposition" newspapers with a readership base intending to vote for CHP. The findings suggest that over the course of the election campaign, internal pluralism in both conservative and opposition papers declined in terms of voice given to respective parties and tone of news coverage.