Christian Elmelund-Præstekær
Biographic Data
| ID | 4378236 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Elmelund-Præstekær |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Elmelund-Præstekær |
| SIGNATURE | ELMELUND-PRÆSTEKÆR C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern Denmark |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5095-8917 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 465 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Party performance explains disagreement between politicians and their parties
Are politicians more likely to disagree with their party after an electoral defeat or during a spell in opposition? If so, are they likely to advocate a more moderate or a more radical position than their party? In order to evaluate this, the article analyses the absolute distance between candidates for parliament and their parties on the left–right dimension. The sample used consists of 5614 politicians from 11 countries (Comparative Candidate S…
What have I done to deserve this? The role of deservingness in effects of ordinary citizens as cases in the news
Previous studies have shown that cases in news reporting have substantial attitudinal effects on the audience. The direction of results has been mixed, however. Some studies reported that news audience change opinion in favour of the position of the case, while other studies reported the opposite. In this article, we emphasize the deservingness of cases as a potential factor explaining the differences in previous results. In two population-based …
Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party
This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the bas…
What wins public support? Communicating or obfuscating welfare state retrenchment
Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to e…
Ebbs and flows of negative campaigning: A longitudinal study of the influence of contextual factors on Danish campaign rhetoric
This article investigates the level of negative campaigning in Danish national election campaigns from 1971 and onwards. The ambition of the article is two-fold. First, it empirically debugs the widespread myth that campaign rhetoric is becoming more and more negative over the years. Second, it theoretically advances the understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning by studying a range of contextual factors that affect the general lev…
The partisanship of systemic retrenchment: Tax policy and welfare reform in Denmark 1975–2008
We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diff…
Partisan Effects on Welfare State Retrenchment: Empirical Evidence from a Measurement of Government Intentions
The effect of partisanship is disputed in the literature on welfare state retrenchment. The ‘new politics’ school argues that partisan conflicts are irrelevant to the understanding of retrenchment, but the second generation of retrenchment research concludes that such conflicts are still important. We engage in this debate by introducing a new empirical approach. Our method provides a necessary but currently missing link in the second generation …
Strategic Re‐framing as a Vote Winner: Why Vote‐seeking Governments Pursue Unpopular Reforms
Most political science accounts assume that governments in Western democracies avoid unpopular reforms to protect their re‐election chances. Nevertheless, governments sometimes embark on electorally risky reforms – even in times when they have no slack in the polls. In this article, it is argued that pursuing unpopular reforms can be a perfectly rational strategy for vote‐seeking governments. Based on a simple game theoretical model that compares…
Presidentialisation of Parliamentary Systems? Frontrunner Concentration in Danish Local Elections
A trend of presidentialisation of non-presidential political systems has been identified and discussed in the literature. However, a central aspect of the process, increasingly leadership-focused voting behaviour, is only rudimentarily studied. We assess whether frontrunners have become more important in elections in a non-presidential multiparty system. We develop three measures to assess the electoral frontrunner concentration and study actual …
Does Television Personalise Voting Behaviour? Studying the Effects of Media Exposure on Voting for Candidates or Parties
Scholars have long argued that politics has become personalised throughout the post Second World War era. Increasingly, focus shifts from policy to politicians' personal traits. The media – particularly television, it is argued – is the driving force in the process by focusing more on individual politicians and their personal traits than parties and their policy proposals. Empirically, it is not known whether the personalisation of media content …
Party media agenda-setting: How parties influence election news coverage
Political parties have substantial influence on which issues the news media cover during election campaigns, while the media have limited influence on party agendas. However, we know little about why some parties are more successful than others in passing the media’s gates and being covered on sponsored issues. On the basis of content analyses of election news coverage (812 news stories) and press releases published by political parties (N = 334)…
Policy or institution? The political choice of retrenchment strategy
The present study breaks new ground in the study of welfare reform by developing the theoretical argument that governments can choose between transparent policy retrenchment and less-transparent institutional retrenchment when pursuing welfare state contraction. Policy retrenchment is transparent because it reallocates substantial benefits and has direct and immediate consequences for welfare recipients. Institutional retrenchment is less transpa…
Does Mediatization Change MP-Media Interaction and MP Attitudes toward the Media? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of Danish MPs
Mass media have become more important in political communication in western democracies in recent decades. Parliamentarians need to pay attention to the norms and demands of the media and conform to the ‘media logic’. Politicians allegedly lose communicative autonomy in their interaction with the media and the literature suggests that they regret this development. The consequences of this mediatization process are rarely studied empirically, howe…
Issue ownership as a determinant of negative campaigning
Existing studies on the determinants of negative campaigning conclude that context matters as the degree of positive and negative campaigning vary according to factors such as proximity to election day, poll standing, incumbency status, and the size of the ‘war chest’. The present article discusses whether not only the context, but also the content of campaigns needs to be considered when analysing why and when political parties go negative. The …
Journalism students: Left-wing and politically motivated
In both the public and scientific debates on journalism in western countries, it would appear to be taken for granted that journalists’ political opinions can influence their professional output. Since journalists tend to lean more to the left than the general population, it is often assumed that media content has a left-wing bias. This article discusses and analyses the political motivations among journalism students. A case study of Danish jour…
Beyond American negativity: Toward a General Understanding of the Determinants of Negative Campaigning
This article supplements and further develops the almost exclusively American literature on the determinants of negative campaigning by analyzing the tone of the Danish parties’ election campaigns. It concludes that proximity to governmental power matters, as oppositional parties are more negative than incumbents. This is comparable to the American experiences. The prospect of electoral failure, however, does not affect the tone the same way as p…
An Anatomy of Media Hypes: Developing a Model for the Dynamics and Structure of Intense Media Coverage of Single Issues
■Media hypes are a well known phenomenon. They occur on a regular basis and attract much media attention, but there is very little knowledge about them. This article supplements Vasterman's analysis of the phenomenon and presents new empirical evidence. Through a case study of five Danish media hypes occurring between 2000 and 2005, the article shows that not every event has the potential to trigger a media hype: it must, of course, satisfy the g…
What's the Fuss About? The Interplay of Media Hypes and Politics
Media hypes on social problems occur on a regular basis and they seem to generate a lot of political activity. This article asks the question whether media hypes have any influence on public policies central issue of the hype—and if any, what kind of influence? Five media hypes on the same subject area (the care for and spending on the elderly) are analyzed.Their immediate influence on policy making is traced, and although the media often is assu…
Negative Campaigning in a Multiparty System
The article has a dual purpose: First, it examines the extent of negative campaigning in a parliamentarian multiparty setting. Second, it attempts to move the understanding of the dynamics of negative campaigning beyond the American setting by exposing a Danish case to the American models, assumptions and theories of negativity. The data indicate that bad poll standings and fierce competition correlate positively with a higher degree of negativit…
Party media agenda-setting: How parties influence election news coverage
Political parties have substantial influence on which issues the news media cover during election campaigns, while the media have limited influence on party agendas. However, we know little about why some parties are more successful than others in passing the media’s gates and being covered on sponsored issues. On the basis of content analyses of election news coverage (812 news stories) and press releases published by political parties (N = 334)…
Beyond American negativity: Toward a General Understanding of the Determinants of Negative Campaigning
This article supplements and further develops the almost exclusively American literature on the determinants of negative campaigning by analyzing the tone of the Danish parties’ election campaigns. It concludes that proximity to governmental power matters, as oppositional parties are more negative than incumbents. This is comparable to the American experiences. The prospect of electoral failure, however, does not affect the tone the same way as p…
Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party
This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the bas…
Negative Campaigning in a Multiparty System
The article has a dual purpose: First, it examines the extent of negative campaigning in a parliamentarian multiparty setting. Second, it attempts to move the understanding of the dynamics of negative campaigning beyond the American setting by exposing a Danish case to the American models, assumptions and theories of negativity. The data indicate that bad poll standings and fierce competition correlate positively with a higher degree of negativit…
An Anatomy of Media Hypes: Developing a Model for the Dynamics and Structure of Intense Media Coverage of Single Issues
■Media hypes are a well known phenomenon. They occur on a regular basis and attract much media attention, but there is very little knowledge about them. This article supplements Vasterman's analysis of the phenomenon and presents new empirical evidence. Through a case study of five Danish media hypes occurring between 2000 and 2005, the article shows that not every event has the potential to trigger a media hype: it must, of course, satisfy the g…
Strategic Re‐framing as a Vote Winner: Why Vote‐seeking Governments Pursue Unpopular Reforms
Most political science accounts assume that governments in Western democracies avoid unpopular reforms to protect their re‐election chances. Nevertheless, governments sometimes embark on electorally risky reforms – even in times when they have no slack in the polls. In this article, it is argued that pursuing unpopular reforms can be a perfectly rational strategy for vote‐seeking governments. Based on a simple game theoretical model that compares…
What's the Fuss About? The Interplay of Media Hypes and Politics
Media hypes on social problems occur on a regular basis and they seem to generate a lot of political activity. This article asks the question whether media hypes have any influence on public policies central issue of the hype—and if any, what kind of influence? Five media hypes on the same subject area (the care for and spending on the elderly) are analyzed.Their immediate influence on policy making is traced, and although the media often is assu…
Policy or institution? The political choice of retrenchment strategy
The present study breaks new ground in the study of welfare reform by developing the theoretical argument that governments can choose between transparent policy retrenchment and less-transparent institutional retrenchment when pursuing welfare state contraction. Policy retrenchment is transparent because it reallocates substantial benefits and has direct and immediate consequences for welfare recipients. Institutional retrenchment is less transpa…
Issue ownership as a determinant of negative campaigning
Existing studies on the determinants of negative campaigning conclude that context matters as the degree of positive and negative campaigning vary according to factors such as proximity to election day, poll standing, incumbency status, and the size of the ‘war chest’. The present article discusses whether not only the context, but also the content of campaigns needs to be considered when analysing why and when political parties go negative. The …
Does Mediatization Change MP-Media Interaction and MP Attitudes toward the Media? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of Danish MPs
Mass media have become more important in political communication in western democracies in recent decades. Parliamentarians need to pay attention to the norms and demands of the media and conform to the ‘media logic’. Politicians allegedly lose communicative autonomy in their interaction with the media and the literature suggests that they regret this development. The consequences of this mediatization process are rarely studied empirically, howe…
What wins public support? Communicating or obfuscating welfare state retrenchment
Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to e…
The partisanship of systemic retrenchment: Tax policy and welfare reform in Denmark 1975–2008
We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diff…
What have I done to deserve this? The role of deservingness in effects of ordinary citizens as cases in the news
Previous studies have shown that cases in news reporting have substantial attitudinal effects on the audience. The direction of results has been mixed, however. Some studies reported that news audience change opinion in favour of the position of the case, while other studies reported the opposite. In this article, we emphasize the deservingness of cases as a potential factor explaining the differences in previous results. In two population-based …
Does Television Personalise Voting Behaviour? Studying the Effects of Media Exposure on Voting for Candidates or Parties
Scholars have long argued that politics has become personalised throughout the post Second World War era. Increasingly, focus shifts from policy to politicians' personal traits. The media – particularly television, it is argued – is the driving force in the process by focusing more on individual politicians and their personal traits than parties and their policy proposals. Empirically, it is not known whether the personalisation of media content …
Party performance explains disagreement between politicians and their parties
Are politicians more likely to disagree with their party after an electoral defeat or during a spell in opposition? If so, are they likely to advocate a more moderate or a more radical position than their party? In order to evaluate this, the article analyses the absolute distance between candidates for parliament and their parties on the left–right dimension. The sample used consists of 5614 politicians from 11 countries (Comparative Candidate S…
Journalism students: Left-wing and politically motivated
In both the public and scientific debates on journalism in western countries, it would appear to be taken for granted that journalists’ political opinions can influence their professional output. Since journalists tend to lean more to the left than the general population, it is often assumed that media content has a left-wing bias. This article discusses and analyses the political motivations among journalism students. A case study of Danish jour…
Ebbs and flows of negative campaigning: A longitudinal study of the influence of contextual factors on Danish campaign rhetoric
This article investigates the level of negative campaigning in Danish national election campaigns from 1971 and onwards. The ambition of the article is two-fold. First, it empirically debugs the widespread myth that campaign rhetoric is becoming more and more negative over the years. Second, it theoretically advances the understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning by studying a range of contextual factors that affect the general lev…
Partisan Effects on Welfare State Retrenchment: Empirical Evidence from a Measurement of Government Intentions
The effect of partisanship is disputed in the literature on welfare state retrenchment. The ‘new politics’ school argues that partisan conflicts are irrelevant to the understanding of retrenchment, but the second generation of retrenchment research concludes that such conflicts are still important. We engage in this debate by introducing a new empirical approach. Our method provides a necessary but currently missing link in the second generation …
What's the Fuss About? The Interplay of Media Hypes and Politics
Media hypes on social problems occur on a regular basis and they seem to generate a lot of political activity. This article asks the question whether media hypes have any influence on public policies central issue of the hype—and if any, what kind of influence? Five media hypes on the same subject area (the care for and spending on the elderly) are analyzed.Their immediate influence on policy making is traced, and although the media often is assu…
Negative Campaigning in a Multiparty System
The article has a dual purpose: First, it examines the extent of negative campaigning in a parliamentarian multiparty setting. Second, it attempts to move the understanding of the dynamics of negative campaigning beyond the American setting by exposing a Danish case to the American models, assumptions and theories of negativity. The data indicate that bad poll standings and fierce competition correlate positively with a higher degree of negativit…
An Anatomy of Media Hypes: Developing a Model for the Dynamics and Structure of Intense Media Coverage of Single Issues
■Media hypes are a well known phenomenon. They occur on a regular basis and attract much media attention, but there is very little knowledge about them. This article supplements Vasterman's analysis of the phenomenon and presents new empirical evidence. Through a case study of five Danish media hypes occurring between 2000 and 2005, the article shows that not every event has the potential to trigger a media hype: it must, of course, satisfy the g…
Journalism students: Left-wing and politically motivated
In both the public and scientific debates on journalism in western countries, it would appear to be taken for granted that journalists’ political opinions can influence their professional output. Since journalists tend to lean more to the left than the general population, it is often assumed that media content has a left-wing bias. This article discusses and analyses the political motivations among journalism students. A case study of Danish jour…
Beyond American negativity: Toward a General Understanding of the Determinants of Negative Campaigning
This article supplements and further develops the almost exclusively American literature on the determinants of negative campaigning by analyzing the tone of the Danish parties’ election campaigns. It concludes that proximity to governmental power matters, as oppositional parties are more negative than incumbents. This is comparable to the American experiences. The prospect of electoral failure, however, does not affect the tone the same way as p…
Does Mediatization Change MP-Media Interaction and MP Attitudes toward the Media? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of Danish MPs
Mass media have become more important in political communication in western democracies in recent decades. Parliamentarians need to pay attention to the norms and demands of the media and conform to the ‘media logic’. Politicians allegedly lose communicative autonomy in their interaction with the media and the literature suggests that they regret this development. The consequences of this mediatization process are rarely studied empirically, howe…
Issue ownership as a determinant of negative campaigning
Existing studies on the determinants of negative campaigning conclude that context matters as the degree of positive and negative campaigning vary according to factors such as proximity to election day, poll standing, incumbency status, and the size of the ‘war chest’. The present article discusses whether not only the context, but also the content of campaigns needs to be considered when analysing why and when political parties go negative. The …
Does Television Personalise Voting Behaviour? Studying the Effects of Media Exposure on Voting for Candidates or Parties
Scholars have long argued that politics has become personalised throughout the post Second World War era. Increasingly, focus shifts from policy to politicians' personal traits. The media – particularly television, it is argued – is the driving force in the process by focusing more on individual politicians and their personal traits than parties and their policy proposals. Empirically, it is not known whether the personalisation of media content …
Party media agenda-setting: How parties influence election news coverage
Political parties have substantial influence on which issues the news media cover during election campaigns, while the media have limited influence on party agendas. However, we know little about why some parties are more successful than others in passing the media’s gates and being covered on sponsored issues. On the basis of content analyses of election news coverage (812 news stories) and press releases published by political parties (N = 334)…
Policy or institution? The political choice of retrenchment strategy
The present study breaks new ground in the study of welfare reform by developing the theoretical argument that governments can choose between transparent policy retrenchment and less-transparent institutional retrenchment when pursuing welfare state contraction. Policy retrenchment is transparent because it reallocates substantial benefits and has direct and immediate consequences for welfare recipients. Institutional retrenchment is less transpa…
Partisan Effects on Welfare State Retrenchment: Empirical Evidence from a Measurement of Government Intentions
The effect of partisanship is disputed in the literature on welfare state retrenchment. The ‘new politics’ school argues that partisan conflicts are irrelevant to the understanding of retrenchment, but the second generation of retrenchment research concludes that such conflicts are still important. We engage in this debate by introducing a new empirical approach. Our method provides a necessary but currently missing link in the second generation …
Strategic Re‐framing as a Vote Winner: Why Vote‐seeking Governments Pursue Unpopular Reforms
Most political science accounts assume that governments in Western democracies avoid unpopular reforms to protect their re‐election chances. Nevertheless, governments sometimes embark on electorally risky reforms – even in times when they have no slack in the polls. In this article, it is argued that pursuing unpopular reforms can be a perfectly rational strategy for vote‐seeking governments. Based on a simple game theoretical model that compares…
Presidentialisation of Parliamentary Systems? Frontrunner Concentration in Danish Local Elections
A trend of presidentialisation of non-presidential political systems has been identified and discussed in the literature. However, a central aspect of the process, increasingly leadership-focused voting behaviour, is only rudimentarily studied. We assess whether frontrunners have become more important in elections in a non-presidential multiparty system. We develop three measures to assess the electoral frontrunner concentration and study actual …
Ebbs and flows of negative campaigning: A longitudinal study of the influence of contextual factors on Danish campaign rhetoric
This article investigates the level of negative campaigning in Danish national election campaigns from 1971 and onwards. The ambition of the article is two-fold. First, it empirically debugs the widespread myth that campaign rhetoric is becoming more and more negative over the years. Second, it theoretically advances the understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning by studying a range of contextual factors that affect the general lev…
The partisanship of systemic retrenchment: Tax policy and welfare reform in Denmark 1975–2008
We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diff…
What wins public support? Communicating or obfuscating welfare state retrenchment
Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to e…
Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party
This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the bas…
What have I done to deserve this? The role of deservingness in effects of ordinary citizens as cases in the news
Previous studies have shown that cases in news reporting have substantial attitudinal effects on the audience. The direction of results has been mixed, however. Some studies reported that news audience change opinion in favour of the position of the case, while other studies reported the opposite. In this article, we emphasize the deservingness of cases as a potential factor explaining the differences in previous results. In two population-based …
Party performance explains disagreement between politicians and their parties
Are politicians more likely to disagree with their party after an electoral defeat or during a spell in opposition? If so, are they likely to advocate a more moderate or a more radical position than their party? In order to evaluate this, the article analyses the absolute distance between candidates for parliament and their parties on the left–right dimension. The sample used consists of 5614 politicians from 11 countries (Comparative Candidate S…
Political science (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Media Studies and Communication (7 works)