Frame building and frame sponsorship in the 2011 Spanish election: the practices of polarised pluralism

This study assesses if the well-established polarised pluralism of the Spanish news media system translated into frame sponsorship during the 2011 Spanish General Election. After reviewing the historical and cultural influences that shaped the 2011 Spanish electoral campaign, I conduct a qualitative discourse analysis of 96 news releases issued by the 2 main Spanish political parties, the Socialist Party and the People’s Party, to identify their sponsored diagnostic and prognostic frames. I then compare the partisan news releases with 27 El País and El Mundo editorials that evaluated the party-sponsored frames to explore if and to what extent both Spanish leading newspapers adopted the party-sponsored frames. Findings show that the political parties succeeded in dominating news narratives about what was at stake in the election, since the newspapers clearly sponsored partisan frames and supported the parties’ political aspirations. Results also demonstrate that the newspapers sporadically challenged details of partisan diagnostic and prognostic frames, especially after the election. These discrepancies, however, do not challenge partisan ideological foundations.