Everything to stay the same - conservative performativity identified
After two days of the official start of the electoral campaign, we think that we have already identified a performative intent in conservative leaning main stream media for the Galician election. Media coverage would tend to present and substantiate the idea that everything stays the same after elections, with unlikely options for change. We observe this trend in two sources: survey data published in conservative media, and cover structure in Galician media, where information about elections is minimal. This survey from NC Data published in extreme right-wing journal La Razón illustrates this trend, where the Parliament stays almost the same, with just a variation of +/- 1 seat.
Galician media offers plenty of examples, compared to prior elections. The case of La Voz de Galicia clearly illustrates our perception. Captures below show the covers of the journal in the week before the official start of the current election compared with those in the prior election (2020).
Prior capture shows the result of prior elections (2020). In that case, the journal started electoral coverage three weeks before the official start of the campaign, starting with a big coverage of a survey followed by a daily tracking with results presented in every cover after that. Early and detailed coverage in the 2020 elections illustrates the contrast with the coverage of the same journal during the same period, with a marginal coverage as shown in the picture below.
The contrast is even starker considering that coverage for the 2020 election was competing in public attention with the COVID-19 pandemic, with no equivalent issue affecting the 2024 election. And the trend is not specific of this journal. The trend is clearly visible in the treatment of government broadcasting media, remarkably in the case of TVG, where elections are treated only in marginal positions, and usually as a way to give prominence to the state level campaign, lead by PP, to deteriorate the image of Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
Analysis
This frame would work at the same time for both sides of a bipartisan political spectrum: avoiding any peception of plausible change to avoid a mobilization of the left and right wing extremism (VOX) and populism (DOU); while reinforcing the band-wagon effect in the moderate and conservative side by portraying PP as the likely winner. Our interpretation suggests that analysts have a preference to produce a perception of low likelihood of change, with a predominance of PP and just sligh increase for the BNG on the left.
Parametrization
We keep our model as it is.
