How Political and Media System Characteristics Moderate Interactions between Newspapers and Parliaments: Economic Crisis Attention in Spain and the Netherlands

Abstract

This paper investigates the multidirectional causal relationships between negative economic coverage in two national newspapers and parliamentary questions addressing the economic crisis in Spain and the Netherlands, while controlling for the “real” economy as portrayed by stock market indices. Weekly level vector autoregression (VAR) analyses demonstrate for both countries that newspaper coverage is affected by stock market ratings and parliamentary questions. In Spain, newspaper coverage also affects parliament. A more detailed analysis shows that in Spain, the newspaper that is close to the government is ignored by the opposition as a source for parliamentary questions, while this newspaper also ignores the attention the opposition pays to negative economic developments in its parliamentary questions. In the Netherlands, we do not find any differences across newspapers. These findings reflect the differences in political and media systems and specifically the differences in the levels of consensus-orientation and political parallelism between the two countries.