Discursive Alliances in the Debate on Migration?: Political Parallelism Between Media and Parties in the Framing of the 2018 Debate on Refugee and Asylum Migration

Abstract

Our study on political parallelism in Germany examines the extent to which media reflect the parties’ central frames in the debate on refugee and asylum migration. Thereby, we consider discursive alliances of individual media outlets and parties. In this context, we moreover address important questions of public sphere theory: Do the media function as organs of particular viewpoints, or do they set the ground for free opinion building by a broad and balanced representation of competing frames? In addition, we discuss the extent to which the media offer political parties a fair opportunity to make their positions observable to the public. Empirically, we analyze the extent of political parallelism based on a content analysis of 18 media outlets and official documents of the seven parties in the German Bundestag. At the level of issue-specific statements, we measure value-based frames. This approach enables us to describe the substance of mediated viewpoints concisely and to identify similarities between media and parties with regard to the framing of the issue. Furthermore, our method allows us to locate media and parties within the space of a basic political cleavage (integration vs. demarcation). Referring to a concept of political sociology enables us to describe the proximity and distance of media and parties in a condensed way.