MASTERARBEIT / MASTER’S THESIS Titel der Masterarbeit / Title of the Master‘s Thesis Captured by the very wealthy? Media bias within the inheritance and gift tax debate in the case of Austria verfasst von / submitted by Maximilian Mansbart, BA angestrebter akademischer Grad / in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (M.A.) Wien, 2018 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt / A 066 824 degree programme code as it appears on the student record sheet: Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt / Masterstudium Politikwissenschaft degree programme as it appears on the student record sheet: Betreut von / Supervisor Univ.-Prof. Markus Wagner, PhD Table of Contents List of figures and tables .................................................................................................................. 4 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... 6 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 7 1.1. Structure and content ............................................................................................................... 8 2. Research interest .......................................................................................................................... 8 2.1. Inequality ................................................................................................................................. 9 2.1.1. Proof for wealth inequality ............................................................................................. 10 2.1.2. Why wealth inequality should not to be ignored ............................................................ 11 2.1.3. Why wealth inequality could be ignored ........................................................................ 12 2.2. Impact of inheritance taxation ............................................................................................... 13 2.2.1. Ideological component of the IGT ................................................................................. 14 2.3. The Case of the Austrian IGT ............................................................................................... 15 2.3.1. High amounts of wealth concentration in Austria .......................................................... 16 2.4. Public attitudes towards the IGT ........................................................................................... 17 2.4.1. Public attitudes towards the IGT in Austria ................................................................... 17 2.5. Discrepancy ........................................................................................................................... 18 3. Theoretical approach ................................................................................................................. 19 3.1. Captured democracy .............................................................................................................. 20 3.1.1. Media capture ................................................................................................................. 22 3.2. Media bias ............................................................................................................................. 25 3.2.1. Defining media bias ....................................................................................................... 25 3.2.2. Effects of media on public attitudes ............................................................................... 26 3.3. Alternative explanations ........................................................................................................ 27 3.3.1. Divided society ............................................................................................................... 27 3.3.2. Fairness .......................................................................................................................... 28 3.3.3. Excluded society ............................................................................................................ 29 3.3.4. Loss aversion .................................................................................................................. 30 3.4. Austria’s newspaper media ................................................................................................... 30 3.4.1. The very special case of the Kronen Zeitung ................................................................. 31 4. Empirical approach ....................................................................................................................... 33 4.1. Methods and data ...................................................................................................................... 35 4.1.1. The two sides of the inheritance and gift tax-debate ................................................................. 35 4.1.2 Material .............................................................................................................................. 35 1 4.2. Operationalization ..................................................................................................................... 37 4.2.1. Language in the press releases .............................................................................................. 37 4.2.1.1. Phrases ........................................................................................................... 38 4.2.1.2. Words ............................................................................................................ 41 4.2.2. Language in the articles ....................................................................................................... 46 4.2.3. Experts .............................................................................................................................. 47 4.2.4. Lobbies .............................................................................................................................. 49 4.2.5. Difference of means testing .................................................................................................. 50 4.2.6. Difference of means testing (proportional values) ................................................................... 50 4.2.7. Three election campaigns ..................................................................................................... 51 4.3. Empirical results ........................................................................................................................ 52 4.3.1. Language bias .................................................................................................................... 54 4.3.2. Visibility bias ..................................................................................................................... 60 4.3.3. Bias during election campaigns ............................................................................................ 65 4.3.4. Reliability of the model ........................................................................................................ 66 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 68 5.1. Results ................................................................................................................................... 69 5.2. Impact and contribution ......................................................................................................... 71 5.3. Limitations ............................................................................................................................ 72 5.4. Discussion ............................................................................................................................. 73 6. References ...................................................................................................................................... 74 6.1. Web Sources ............................................................................................................................. 81 7. Appendix ....................................................................................................................................... 85 Appendix A: Programming scripts .................................................................................................... 85 A1. Parsing and extracting press releases ........................................................................................ 85 A2. Purge press releases ........................................................................................................... 85 A2.1. List of “Stopwords” ....................................................................................... 87 A3. Language, experts and lobbies in articles .......................................................................... 87 A3.1. Election Campaigns ....................................................................................... 93 Appendix B: Codebook .................................................................................................................... 95 B1. List of variables ................................................................................................................. 95 Appendix C: Tables and graphs ......................................................................................................... 96 C1.