Political representation and educational attainment:Evidence from the Netherlands (1994-2010)

This article examines the extent to which differences in educational attainment produce unequal political representation. The lowest educated have almost disappeared from political office-holding, and some scholars argue that, subsequently, their preferences are underrepresented. However, the substantive underrepresentation of the least educated has yet to be empirically established. Based on data of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies 1994-2010, this study finds that the preferences of least educated citizens are worse represented than the preferences of higher educated citizens, indicating that political representation is biased towards the highest educated. This unequal representation is found on moral, socio-economic and cultural issues. However, the underrepresentation of the lowest educated is not continually present. This study shows that successful right-wing populist parties enhanced the substantive representation of the least educated in certain policy areas

Images with impact: The electoral consequences of party leader portrayal in the media

This dissertation studies how the media portray party leaders in terms of their character traits, and when and to what extent these mediated leadership images have electoral consequences. The research focusses on the media portrayal of party leaders to establish leader effects, instead of leader perceptions of voters, because (a) media are voters’ principal source of political information and, therefore, strongly affect voters’ perceptions of party leaders, and (b) this way the causal direction can be more firmly established. Mediated leader effects are studied in the Netherlands in the period 2006 to 2012 applying a multi-method research design, which includes a theoretical conceptualization of leadership traits, automated content analysis, manual content analysis, and panel data analysis. Based on the findings, four conclusions can be drawn. First, five leadership traits are used in Dutch political news coverage: political craftsmanship, vigorousness, integrity, communicative skills and consistency. Second, there is a gender bias in the way the media portray the leadership traits of politicians, related to the masculinity of the leadership stereotype. Third, media coverage of party leaders in terms of their leadership traits affects electoral behavior: positive leadership images in media coverage stimulate support for the leader’s party, and negative leadership images undermine support. Fourth, the impact of mediated leadership images on electoral behavior is conditional and (at least occasionally) dependent on the tone of the media coverage, the presence of an election campaign, whether the leadership image appears in newspaper coverage or television coverage, and specific voter characteristics

Political leaders and the media: can we measure political leadership images in newspapers using computer-assisted content analysis?

Despite the large amount of research into both media coverage of politics as well as political leadership, surprisingly little research has been devoted to the ways political leaders are discussed in the media. This paper studies whether computer-aided content analysis can be applied in examining political leadership images in Dutch newspaper articles. It, firstly, provides a conceptualization of political leader character traits that integrates different perspectives in the literature. Moreover, this paper measures twelve political leadership images in media coverage, based on a large-scale computer-assisted content analysis of Dutch media coverage (including almost 150.000 newspaper articles), and systematically tests the quality of the employed measurement instrument by assessing the relationship between the images, the variance in the measurement, the over-time development of images for two party leaders and by comparing the computer results with manual coding. We conclude that the computerized content analysis provides a valid measurement for the leadership images in Dutch newspapers. Moreover, we find that the dimensions political craftsmanship, vigorousness, integrity, communicative performances and consistency are regularly applied in discussing party leaders, but that portrayal of party leaders in terms of responsiveness is almost completely absent in Dutch newspapers

Leadership Traits in Dutch Media

In this research project, the way that party leaders are discussed in terms of their leadership traits in media coverage is studied. To this end, both automated and manual content analyses are conducted. Here, one can find the search strings for the automated content analysis of newspapers and the codebook for the manual content analysis of both newspaper articles and television programs