Media Visibility and Information-Seeking: Analyzing the Impact of News Coverage on Wikipedia Pageviews of Estonian MPs (2015–2023)

The news media are a primary but limited source of political information for voters. This article examines how the media coverage of members of parliament (MPs) prompts people to seek more information about MPs—an important element of voters’ political knowledge and democratic accountability. I use all available online content from four major Estonian newspapers during 2015–2023 ( <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mo>∼</mml:mo> </mml:math> 140,000 articles) and pre-trained transformer models to classify the sentiment and policy issues of news articles that mention MPs. I match media data with MPs’ Wikipedia pageviews on a daily basis over two legislative terms. First, the results show that media visibility of MPs is associated with more views of their Wikipedia page on the same day. Second, news articles with negative sentiment have a greater impact on information-seeking than those with a positive or neutral tone. Third, the impact of MPs' media appearances on information-seeking is dependent on the policy context as well as party affiliation. The findings have implications for understanding the consequences of political communication and democratic representation in the digital age.