Erasmus Mundus M.A. Journalism, Media and Globalisation Specialization: Media and Politics THE CASE OF DENK: Expanding the protest paradigm to new political parties by Jesse Joannes Beentjes Student ID: 10175008 Master’s Thesis Graduate School of Communication Master’s programme in Communication Science Supervisor/Examiner: dr. mr. J.H.P. van Spanje Date of completion: May 31st, 2017 Table of contents Abstract p. 3 Introduction p. 3 Description of the case: DENK and its background p. 5 Theoretical framework p. 5 The hierarchy of influences model p. 5 Framing theory p. 7 The protest paradigm p. 7 Hypotheses p. 8 Methodology p. 10 Operationalization p. 11 Reliability p. 13 Limitations p. 13 Results p. 14 Discussion p. 17 Conclusion p. 19 Acknowledgements p. 21 List of references p. 22 Appendix 1: Codebook p. 27 2 [ABSTRACT] The 2017 Dutch elections were characterized by a considerable number of new political parties. New political parties are fundamental to pluralist democracies. Their performance and organization have been studied extensively, but analyses of media coverage remain scarce. This paper takes the newspaper coverage of the five national Dutch newspapers (n= 449) on the new Dutch political party DENK as the subject of a quantitative content analysis. As such, it measures to what extent the protest paradigm was used to frame this party. Was the attention of the party’s main agenda drawn away towards either deviant, threatening or impotent frames? This paper connects the protest paradigm to Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences model, in order to give an overview of factors influencing the frames. As such, it also investigates if this concept, which was previously reserved for protest movements, is an effective way of categorising media frames of new political parties. By doing so, this paper takes a new step towards the formulation of a new theory on media framing of new political parties Keywords: protest paradigm, new political parties, the Netherlands, elections, hierarchy of influences, framing, DENK, multiculturalism, migrant-parties 3 Introduction On the day of the 2017 Dutch parliamentary elections, a problem was identified by many voters: the large amount of parties on the voting ballots made it hard to fold the paper properly, in order to vote (RTL Nieuws, 15 March 2017). This was caused by the fact that no less than 28 parties were running for parliament, half of them ‘new parties’ (Kiesraad, 2017). Only two of them eventually made it into parliament, a score that fits into earlier research on the amount of new political parties entering the Dutch Tweede Kamer (Krouwel and Lucardie, 2008). New political parties are a fundamental feature of vivid pluralist democracies. The demand for these parties is related to social heterogeneity and social or value change; they emerge because traditional parties have failed to absorb new issues in their programmes (Sikk, 2012; Hug, 2000; Muller-Rommel, 2002). Seemingly marginal politicians and groups can quickly catalyse powerful institutional changes, once the global government changes (Henson and Kopstein, 2005, 91). Previous research has brought forward a number of conditions for new parties to be successful, that are related to the party’s origin (roots in civil society, initial programmatic profile) and its developmental process (organisational strength, leadership potential and the occurrence of defections) (Beyens et al., 2015; Bolleyer and Bytzek, 2016). This paper takes into consideration another factor that is important for the profile and performance of new political parties: media coverage and framing. It takes DENK, one of the two political parties to make it to parliament in the 2017 Dutch elections, as a case study. Coverage from the five main Dutch daily newspapers of this party (n=449) was the subject of a quantitative content analysis, measuring the presence of the protest paradigm. This term was originally coined to describe a set of media frames in coverage of protest movements (Lee, 2014). For the first time, this paper expands the paradigm to the realm of new political parties, and as such the paradigm figures in the main research question of this paper: RQ1: To what extent is the protest paradigm present in the media coverage of the new Dutch political party DENK? The theoretical framework that forms the backbone of this study, combines framing theory and the protest paradigm as its manifestation with Shoemaker and Reese’s model of the hierarchy of influences, in order to explain the outcome of this study. The multiculturalist agenda of DENK is also taken into consideration, as the 4 framework relies on on Cottle’s (2000) claim that multiculturalism impacts on all levels of editorial decision-making. The societal relevance of this study lies in the fact that new political parties challenge and change the traditional landscape in both ‘new’ and old democracies all around the world (Selb and Pituctin, 2010). Examples are the Spanish Podemos, the Italian Movimento Cinque Stelle and recently En Marche!, the party of the French president Emmanuel Macron. All these parties have affected the democracies they operate in, and should therefore be taken seriously in all their aspects, including media coverage. Academic analysis of media framing of new political parties is very scarce; while new parties as a whole are an increasingly popular subject of study (Sikk, 2012; Engler, 2015; Zons, 2015; Beyens et al., 2015), framing analysis of political parties in the media focusses on old political parties or remains limited to new right-wing anti-immigration parties, such as the Dutch PVV (Baumgartner and Chaqués-Bonafant, 2015; Mazzoleni, 2003; Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart, 2007; Bos et al., 2008). This paper steps into that void, by taking a non-right wing, explicitly pro-immigrant party as a case study. The findings of this paper add media framing as another factor to the already existing conditions for a new political party’s success, and set a step towards the formulation of a new theory regarding media coverage of new political parties. Description of the case: DENK and its background The political party DENK is an example of the third category of new parties as defined by Krouwel and Lucardie (2008): a split-party. It was founded in February 2015 by two former members of the Labour Party (PvdA). Turkish-Dutch members of parliament Tunahan Kuzu and Selçuk Öztürk first were a fraction, the Group Kuzu- Öztürk, that stayed in the parliament on the seats that formerly belonged to the Labour- fraction: they were so-called seat-thieves (‘zetelrovers’) (Du Pré, 2016). Having left the Labour party because of a major disagreement on integration and multiculturalism, these two topics became the main content of DENK’s agenda. This is already reflected in the name of the party: ‘denk’ is not only the Dutch first person singular and imperative of the verb ‘to think’, it is also Turkish for ‘equality’. According to its motto, ‘DENK is a party for the assertive New Dutch’. 5 The party was controversial from its launch in February 2015, because of its aggressive political style and continuously displayed distrust in the media. Besides of this, the fact that Kuzu and Öztürk refused to acknowledge the Armenian genocide or to take distance from the Turkish president Erdogan and his repression of the press and opposition raised questions about their loyalty to the Netherlands. For a short period, famous Surinamese-Dutch DJ Sylvana Simons joined the party, which brought again a lot of media attention for the party, only to leave the party a couple of months later, according to herself because of an increasing discontent with DENK’s ‘too conservative’ direction (Nieuwsuur, 2017). During the 2017 elections, DENK won three seats in parliament. Theoretical framework This study uses three main theories, namely the protest paradigm, the hierarchy of influences model and framing theory. In the following paragraphs, each individual theory used in this study will be shortly discussed, after which a line will be drawn between the three. The hierarchy of influences model The influential hierarchy of influences-model is not a formal theory, as it would be hard to incorporate all the different levels of analysis present in the model in one single study (Li, 2016). The model is more of a ‘theoretical umbrella’, or a tool get an overview of all the different implications, individuals and institutions that together shape the represented reality in the media (Li, 2016). The model is built up out of five concentric circles, in which “media content” is the core, being hierarchically influenced by all outer layers. Each level has its features and role-players, but together, they form a ‘media society’. In this media society, each individual layer is interrelated to the others, rather than that there are strict boundaries. The model serves as a tool to see the interconnectedness of the media with culture, other organizations and institutions (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014). The model is laid out in the following layers, from small to large: individual, routines, organizational, extra- media (institutional) and ideological (socio-cultural) (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014; Reese, 2007). The first level looks at the characteristics of individual journalists and everything 6 that identifies that them. This can be as gender, sexual orientation, race, political preference and age, but also a journalist’s professional role conception, educational background and ethics (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014). The second level of the routines, emerges over a longer period of time in the newsroom, where patterns and routines take shape that influence content or decide whether this will be content at all, as White’s well-known “Mr Gates”-principle shows (White, 1950). Thirdly, the organizational level, comprises the internal structure of a media organization, for example enterprise policy, but also the ownership of the organization (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014) and the way in which this directly or indirectly influences the content.