Do media respond to party conflict? Debates on European integration in British, Dutch and German party manifestos and newspapers, 1987-2006

How do policy issues reach the political agenda? This question has received ample scholarly attention over the last decades, yet only recently have researchers explicitly examined the ways in which the agendas of political parties and media interact. This study builds on this ongoing work to examine how the conflict among parties in terms of the policy stances they propose (positional conflict) and the frames they attach to policy issues (discursive conflict) affect media attention. By focusing on party debates on European integration in British, Dutch and German election campaigns between 1987 and 2006 and employing a pooled time-series analysis, the study shows that both positional and discursive conflict among parties boost media reporting on issues. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the dynamics of media attention in relation to particular policy issues, as well as the way in which parties and media interact within election campaigns.