Hard and soft news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings

Over 30 years, a large body of research on what is often called ‘hard’ and ‘soft news’ has accumulated in communication studies. However, there is no consensus about what hard and soft news exactly is, or how it should be defined or measured. Moreover, the concept has not been clearly differentiated from or systematically related to concepts addressing very similar phenomena – tabloidization and ‘infotainment’. Consequently, the results of various studies are hard to compare and different scientific discourses on related issues remain unconnected. Against this backdrop, this article offers a conceptual analysis of the concept based on studies in English and other languages. We identify key dimensions of the concept and make suggestions for a standardized definition and multi-dimensional measurement of harder and softer news. In doing so, we propose to distinguish thematic, focus and style features as basic dimensions that – in their combination – make up harder and softer types of news

Zippin’ up my boots, goin’ back to my roots: Radical left parties in Southern Europe

Radical left parties actively encourage the participation of their members in internal decision-making and insist on promoting organised links to trade unions and social movements. As a party family, they deviate from what is considered to be the trend in which Western political parties have turned their backs on their social roots. Drawing on the experience of South European radical left parties from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the recent financial crisis, we argue that ideology, electoral incentives, party competition and external events explain the radical left's pronounced emphasis on linkage, while organisational trajectory explains variation within the party family in terms of the linkage strategies pursued

Party rules, party resources, and the politics of parliamentary democracies: how parties organize in the 21st Century

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focussing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older datasets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: i.e., declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and in the forms that this democratization takes

Campaigning across continents: how Latin American parties link up with migrant associations abroad

Emigrant voting rights have opened new electoral arenas, and many political parties increasingly campaign across borders. Yet relatively little is known about the challenges parties confront when campaigning transnationally and the strategies they have developed in response to these challenges. This paper addresses these shortcomings. First, I investigate the hurdles Latin American parties face in linking up with organized migrant collectives in residency countries for campaigning purposes. Second, I probe into the transnational linkage strategies these parties deploy to tap into migrant associations’ resources and mobilization capacities. This study builds on a comparative research design and draws on almost 40 semi-structured interviews with Bolivian and Ecuadorian party activists as well as association leaders in Barcelona, Spain. Departing from the party interest group literature, I identify three transnational linkage strategies Bolivian and Ecuadorian parties implement: 1) Infiltration, 2) Co-optation, and 3) Cooperation. All parties execute these tactics informally in order to comply with local norms that require associations to remain apolitical. The analysis further demonstrates that differences between home-country electoral systems shape the types of linkage strategies Bolivian and Ecuadorian parties use. This article contributes to the study of migrant politics and political parties in important ways. This study highlights how political parties actively negotiate their entry into the transnational electoral arena, and sheds light on how migrants remain politically connected to their home countries

Multiplex media attention and disregard network among 129 countries

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Introducing the Party-interest group relationships in contemporary democracies datasets

Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviou