Cross-National Evidence of Disproportionate Media Visibility for the Radical Right in the 2024 European Elections

2026-01-09

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study examines whether media visibility of far-right parties during the 2024 European Parliament elections aligned with their actual electoral support across Austria, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Portugal. Combining computational text analysis with manual annotation of news coverage, the research identifies party affiliations in media reports and aggregates them by European Parliament political families. For the first time in a cross-national framework, the findings quantitatively demonstrate that far-right parties in Austria, Germany, and Ireland received substantially more media attention than warranted by their vote shares, particularly in the latter stages of the campaign. This overrepresentation was pervasive across high-traffic outlets, indicating a systemic rather than incidental bias in reporting practices, which exacerbates inequalities in democratic competition.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Humans and AI: Voting
• Computer Vision: Bias, Fairness & Privacy

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems

Abstract

This study provides a systematic comparative analysis of media visibility of different political families during the 2024 European Parliament elections. We analyzed close to 21,500 unique news from leading national outlets in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Portugal - countries with diverse political contexts and levels of media trust. Combining computational and human classification, we identified parties, political leaders, and groups from the article's URLs and titles, and clustered them according to European Parliament political families and broad political leanings. Cross-country comparison shows that the Mainstream and the Radical Right were mentioned more often than the other political groups. Moreover, the Radical Right received disproportionate attention relative to electoral results (from 2019 or 2024) and electoral projections, particularly in Austria, Germany, and Ireland. This imbalance increased in the final weeks of the campaign, when media influence on undecided voters is greatest. Outlet-level analysis shows that coverage of right-leaning entities dominated across news sources, especially those generating the highest traffic, suggesting a structural rather than outlet-specific pattern. Media visibility is a central resource, and this systematic mapping of online coverage highlights how traditional media can contribute to structural asymmetries in democratic competition.

Problem

• media visibility
• radical right
• European elections
• disproportionate coverage
• democratic competition

Innovation

• media visibility
• radical right
• computational content analysis
• cross-national comparison
• electoral coverage