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frequently in publicly funded than commercial media – frequently assumes
propagandistic overtones.
Fourth, new democracies are middle- or low-income countries, hence
government-controlled electronic media may, for many, be the only mass media citizens
are exposed to. Where governments, presidents and/or parties try to use public television
to spread thinly veiled partisan propaganda, this fact almost always contradicts more or
less strong popular expectations of a non-partisan political coverage on major and
publicly financed providers of political information. This tension often turns into a major
political issue itself, with intriguing implications for campaigns.
Thus, our analysis focuses on public television broadcast that, we believe, was to
serve the electoral interests of the main party, alliance or presidential candidate(s)
representing in an election the incumbents of the day. The cases covered show some
variation in the characteristics that our previous analyses suggested as possible
explanations for governmental abuse of public television coverage helping the
incumbents in intended ways in some elections, but having backfired in others.
We start by reciting the results of a previous study of ours where we demonstrated
that pro-governmental coverage of public television does indeed show such varied
effects, and offered some possible explanations for the occasional occurrence of
boomerang effects. By adding three more elections to our analysis, now we have an
improved ability to consider which of the three may fit the facts best. This new analysis is
presented in the second half of the present paper. We conclude with evaluating the results
and briefly discussing how further evidence could substantially improve our analysis.
1. A Hungarian case study
Our previous study of boomerang effects focused on the 1994 and 1998 Hungarian
elections, which were covered by closely comparable panel survey data (see Popescu and
Tóka 2002). In Appendix 1 we offer an overview of the media and party political
landscape in Hungary, which backs up our interpretation. Readers can ignore this
overview without any loss if they are not particularly interested in context-specific
information.
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