Abstract
How the media cover national election campaigns is both an important and popular object of study. While most research is still focused on singular countries, comparative research has become more common. A comprehensive framework for both investigating and explaining the media coverage of national election campaigns is however largely missing from the literature. This chapter reviews the most important independent and dependent variables as well as the most prominent frameworks used in comparative research on national election news coverage, and seeks to advance research in this area by outlining a theory-based, multilevel framework for investigating and comparing national election news coverage across political and media systems.
Esser, Frank