Issue ownership and news media agenda setting in the 2019 and 2022 Danish national elections: stability and change in times of crises

The legacy news media is still the most important source for political information in Denmark, and most Danes access the news media many times a day (Blach-Ørsten, Eberholst & Burkal, 2017; Schrøder, Blach-Ørsten and Eberholst, 2022). This is even truer in times of an election. For this reason, news media content is often the focus of elections studies, but most election studies of news media content focus on a single country and a single election (Leidecker-Sandmann, 2023). This paper contributes to election research by looking at the news media coverage in the two most recent national Danish elections, with a focus on changes in issue salience and issue competition. We understand issue salience as ‘media salience’, that is to say the amount of attention news media give to specific issues (Moinz & Wlezien, 2020). We also argue that the question of issue salience is largely determined by events that are outside the control of the political parties (Gilardi, Gessler & Kubi, 2022). This was the case in 2019 election, when the draught of 2018 helped put the issue of climate and the environment high on the voter’s agenda’(Blach-Ørsten et al, 2020). In 2022, it was even truer as both the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and an escalating crisis in the Danish health sector, to a high degree framed the election (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2020; Blach-Ørsten and Eberholst, 2022). With regard to issue competition, we build on recent studies that argue that political parties compete in the news media about engaging in popular issues, causing so-called issue-overlap, and even try to ‘steal’ issues from one another (Green-Petersen & Mortensen, 2015; Spoon, Hobolt & De Vries, 2014). This is especially the case in multi-party systems such as Denmark, where more than ten parties have to challenge each other’s ownership of the popular issues (Aalberg & Jessen, 2007).