The quality of referendum debate: The UK's electoral system referendum in the print media
Highlights
► We analyse the quality of debate around the UK's 2011 electoral reform referendum. ► The quantity of coverage was comparable to other electoral reform referendums. ► Coverage was predominantly, but not overwhelmingly, hostile to change. ► Few claims were grounded in reasons and backed by either evidence or logic. ► A quarter of the reasons given were incompatible with established knowledge.
Section snippets
Theorizing the quality of referendum debate
Most recent studies of media coverage of referendum campaigns fall into two main categories. Some use media content analysis alongside public opinion surveys to assess the impact of media cues upon opinion or turnout (see, for example, De Vreese and Semetko, 2002, 2004a, 2004b on the Danish euro referendum of 2000; Breen, 1998 on Irish divorce referendums; and Neijens and van Praag, 2006 and Schuck and de Vreese, 2009 on the Dutch EU referendum of 2005). Others analyse the quality of debate
Methodology
This article analyses the referendum debate as reflected in the print media. There would be merit in extending the analysis to the broadcast media and to online outlets, but that is too much for one paper. There remains a good case for concentrating attention on the print media: impartiality rules in the UK broadcast media constrain the debate there, while most online sources are either based in the traditional media or limited in their readership. The print media remain in many ways the
The quantity of debate
We begin by asking how much the issue of electoral reform was discussed in the print media. Fig. 1 shows the total number of articles captured by our search string in each month from May 2008 to May 2011.3 As we reported previously (Renwick et al., 2011), there
The balance of debate
We turn now to analysis of the balance in the newspaper coverage between support for and opposition to the referendum proposal. Balance matters in such coverage because voters can make an informed decision about the issue only if they have heard both sides of the argument. LeDuc (2011: 558) finds that media coverage of the 2007 Ontario referendum was ‘all but uniformly opposed’ to reform. We need to ask whether the same was true in the UK. We analyse balance both across and within newspapers.
We
The quality of reason-giving
The last indicator of balance that we have just discussed suggests some engagement with complexity, but it says nothing about the quality of that engagement. Did authors, for example, simply bemoan the weakness of arguments on both sides or did they consider carefully the merits of contrasting positions? In this section, we look at two aspects of the quality of reason-giving: its structure (whether debate participants backed their positions with reasons based in evidence or logic); and its
Discussion and conclusions
We begin this final section by considering what we have learnt over the preceding pages. Then we turn to what we do not yet know.
We have learnt a great deal about the debate over AV in the weeks and months before the May 2011 referendum as represented in the print media. This learning relates to the quantity of debate, the balance of that debate, and the quality of reason-giving contained within the debate. In respect of quantity, we saw that the UK referendum was within the range of other
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation grant on ‘Political Reform in the UK: The Evolution of Debate’. We are very grateful to the Foundation for its support. Previous versions were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, 1–4 September 2011 and at a research seminar at the University of Reading. We are grateful to participants for their helpful comments, especially to Ken Carty, Catherine Jones, Georg Lutz, and Jack
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