Det bortglömda valet? – En kvantitativ undersökning av mediernas bevakning kring Europaparlamentsvalet 2009

Abstract

Title: Det bortglömda valet? – En kvantitativ undersökning av mediernas bevakning kring Europaparlamentsvalet 2009 Authors: Elin Kullander and Sara Lundin Subject: The media coverage of the election of the European parliament 2009 Term: Spring 2014 Supervisor: Mats Ekström, JMG, Gothenburg University Pages/words: 44/11 065 Purpose: The purpose has been to investigate how great the media coverage was on the European parliament elections in 2009 and then compare the result to previous elections. The discussion is based on media’s role as a multiplier in a democracy. Method: We have used a quantitative method and studied the media coverage in four Swedish newspapers 23 days before the Swedish election on 7th of June 2009. Results: We have come to the conclusion that media is in fact meeting its democratic role as a multiplier, in any case as long as we only take in conclusion the amount of articles that has been published. We have seen that the media coverage for the first time has increased both in number of articles and in how big the articles were. However, we have to take into account that this does not have to mean a “greater” amount of democracy since we have not done a more qualitative analysis of the information. On subjects it seems that the articles more and more concern the low voter turnout and less about different subjects which the parliament is actually deciding about.