Press-party parallelism in Turkey and in the UK

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1379276 (Table of Contents)

This is a study of press-party parallelism in Turkey and in the UK, which refers to the degree to which the newspaper system parallels the party system. The study first provides a descriptive account of the history of press-party parallelism in the two countries. In the Turkish case, there was no discernible overall trend, from higher to lower parallelism or otherwise, but a number of ups and downs. In the British case, an overall decline is observed over time, but this conclusion is qualified by the differences in the behavior of the different segments of the British press. The study then provides an evaluation of the modernization, commercialization and party system explanations. We do not see, contrary to the prediction based upon modernization approach, a smooth decline in parallelism over time, nor do we observe lower levels of parallelism in the commercialized periods in the two cases. Ideological polarization and cleavage voting, on the other hand, do seem to contribute to higher levels of political parallelism in the press. In the last part of the study, newspapers coverages prior to 2007 elections in Turkey, and 2001, 2005, and 2010 elections in the UK were analyzed using a word-count based methodology. Contrary to our expectations, the level of parallelism was higher in the Turkish press than in the British press, and biased content in newspapers was not limited to opinion pages only, with news articles being just as biased as, and in some cases even more biased than, the opinion articles.