Gaat het nog wel over beleid?

The substance of political reporting is widely discussed in communication science. The focus on non-political issues such as conflict, horse race news, political personalities and strategies would be at expense of the attention for policy proposals. However there is little known about how political leaders and journalists speak about policy proposals in Dutch televised election debates. Previous research mainly focused on quantitative, deductive framing analysis. Therefore this study conducts an inductive qualitative analysis on how policy proposals, made in election manifestos are framed in election debates and in the commentaries afterwards. The results show that election manifestos play a limited role in election debates and the commentaries. This is shown by the fact that the frames that party leaders use in election debates frequently differ compared to the core message of their party manifestos. There seem to be several reasons why party leaders’ frames deviate. For example it seems that party manifestos are quite similar, leading to a discussion on details rather than substantial differences. Also party leaders seem to be very focused on earlier policies instead of new proposals. In some cases party leaders even deny the policy proposals that are made in their party manifestos. Journalists don’t seem to play a guiding role in this as they don’t interpret the statements of the party leaders against the backdrop of their party manifestos. Journalist show to be more interested in non-political issues. This can be seen in commentaries of the debates where journalists are judging party policies mainly by the debating capacities of the participants.