Connotative Associations of Electoral Candidate Mentions in Swiss Newspapers

To what extend the mass media cover election campaigns fairly or, on the contrary, whether they cover elections in biased way, is a perennial debate among researchers, experts, political parties and citizens. We study the coverage of election candidates in the German-Swiss media for the federal elections of 2015, 2019 and 2023. By fine-tuning a large language model and examining the generated data, we show that the coverage of political candidates varies systematically according to their gender, age and party affiliation. The variances relate to political issues that are typically associated with the corresponding characteristics of the candidates and are mainly found in more recent election years and with new candidates. In the 2015 elections and among incumbents, it is only party identification that explains some of the differences in the media coverage of electoral candidates.