Media Effects in a Polarized Political System: The Case of Turkey

Abstract

Can the media influence vote choice when the media and the party system are highly polarized, and vote shifts are infrequent? We argue affirmatively that media significantly influences vote choice even in such systems. First, we show that information filtered through the media has an independent effect on vote choice. Second, we link respondents' newspaper choices in the pre-election survey with the favorability of major political parties in their newspapers during the campaign period. Third, we provide rich empirical data from media content and voter surveys. Our analyses suggest that media content has a significant effect in influencing party support and vote switches during the campaign periods of four general elections between 2002 and 2015 in the increasingly polarized setting of Turkey. We further break down this effect to study how favorable coverage and visibility influence party support differently among partisan loyalists and switchers.