%0 Journal Article
%T Mediated Leader Effects: The Impact of NewspapersĄŻ Portrayal of Party Leadership on Electoral Support
%A Loes Aaldering
%A Tom van der Meer
%A Wouter Van der Brug
%J The International Journal of Press/Politics
%@ 1940-1620
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1940161217740696
%X Conventional wisdom holds that party leaders matter in democratic elections. As very few voters have direct contact with party leaders, media are votersĄŻ primary source of information about these leaders and, thus, the likely origin of leader effects on party support. Our study focuses on these supposed electoral effects of the media coverage of party leaders. We examine the positive and negative effects of specific leadership images in Dutch newspapers on vote intentions. To this end, we combine an extensive automated content analysis of leadership images in the media with a panel data set, the Dutch 1Vandaag Opinion Panel (1VOP), consisting of more than fifty thousand unique respondents and 110 waves of interviews conducted between September 2006 and September 2012. The results confirm that media coverage of party leadersĄŻ character traits affects voters: Positive mediated leadership images increase support for the leaderĄŻs party, while negative images decrease this support. However, this influence is not unconditional: During campaign periods, positive leadership images have a stronger effect, while negative images no longer have an impact on subsequent vote intentions
%K media effects
%K election campaign
%K political leadership
%K Western Europe
%K voting behavior
%K content analysis
%K panel data
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1940161217740696