TY - JOUR

T1 - Dominating the debate

T2 - Visibility bias and mentions of British MPs in newspaper reporting on Brexit

AU - Hönnige, Christoph

AU - Nyhuis, Dominic

AU - Meyer, Philipp

AU - Köker, Philipp

AU - Shikano, Susumu

N1 - Funding Information: We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and also the participants of the conference Advances in the Empirical and Theoretical Study of Parliaments organized by the ECPR Standing Group Parliaments in September 2019, as well as the participants of the Norddeutsches Kolloquium Sozialwissenschaften in July 2019 and January 2020. We would especially like to thank our student assistants Virginia Bergholz, Jule Kegel, Carolin Luksche and Felix Münchow for research support.

PY - 2020/7/7

Y1 - 2020/7/7

N2 - Brexit has been the most important issue in British politics in recentyears. Whereas extra-parliamentary actors dominated the run-up tothe 2016 referendum, the issue moved back to Parliament after thevote. This paper analyses newspaper reporting on Brexit in majorBritish outlets during the post-referendum phase from July 2017to March 2019. We study the visibility of Members of Parliamentto assess whether the debate was balanced between parties andindividual MPs relative to their vote and seat share. We conductan automated text analysis of 58,247 online and offlinenewspaper articles covering the ideological spectrum from left toright, and from pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit. Our main findings are: (1)Conservative politicians dominated the debate, and (2) organizedpro-Brexit MP pressure groups such as ‘Leave Means Leave’ weredisproportionally more visible. This means that reporting wasbiased towards Conservative MPs and within the ConservativeParty towards supporters of a hard Brexit. These findings areremarkably stable across different types of newspapers. Theresults challenge previous analyses that found a higher degree ofbalance in reporting but corroborate recent studies on thetonality of Brexit reporting that found a pro-Brexit bias.

AB - Brexit has been the most important issue in British politics in recentyears. Whereas extra-parliamentary actors dominated the run-up tothe 2016 referendum, the issue moved back to Parliament after thevote. This paper analyses newspaper reporting on Brexit in majorBritish outlets during the post-referendum phase from July 2017to March 2019. We study the visibility of Members of Parliamentto assess whether the debate was balanced between parties andindividual MPs relative to their vote and seat share. We conductan automated text analysis of 58,247 online and offlinenewspaper articles covering the ideological spectrum from left toright, and from pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit. Our main findings are: (1)Conservative politicians dominated the debate, and (2) organizedpro-Brexit MP pressure groups such as ‘Leave Means Leave’ weredisproportionally more visible. This means that reporting wasbiased towards Conservative MPs and within the ConservativeParty towards supporters of a hard Brexit. These findings areremarkably stable across different types of newspapers. Theresults challenge previous analyses that found a higher degree ofbalance in reporting but corroborate recent studies on thetonality of Brexit reporting that found a pro-Brexit bias.

KW - Brexit

KW - newspaper analysis

KW - media bias

KW - visibility

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097521318&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/2474736X.2020.1788955

DO - 10.1080/2474736X.2020.1788955

M3 - Article

VL - 2

SP - 1

EP - 26

JO - Political Research Exchange

JF - Political Research Exchange

SN - 2474-736X

IS - 1

ER -