Campaign Coverage in Spain: Populism, Emerging Parties, and Personalization

Abstract

This chapter analyses the coverage of the Spanish general election campaign in 2015 in various media outlets (television, printed and online press), according to traditional research dimensions in political communication: tone of the campaign, identification of issues, main actors, populist traces, and different frames. Results showed that the most covered issue was party politics and domestic elections, as well as the performance of democracy and governance; the irruption of two emerging parties: Ciudadanos and Podemos; the presence of populist features in the media; the personalisation of the political information; the prominence of the strategic-game frame, the negative tone and conflict on the media coverage of the campaign.