Romanian 2009 presidential elections. Priming and Framing effects

The research team formed of Dr. Nicoleta Corbu, the director of the Center for Research in Communication, and Mădălina Boţan, researcher of the Center, is currently conducting a research project on the topic of the 2009 Romanian presidential elections.

The project is structured on three main axis: quantitative analysis of prime-time news on the main generalist channels, TVR1, Antena 1, PROTV, and on the main news-specialized channels, Realitatea TV and Antena 3, during the whole presidential campaign, and a qualitative analysis, a semiotic and discourse analysis of the main debates of the candidates, and an in-depth interviews based research with the journalists involved in the political analysis of the campaign.

It is a scientific analysis, using and appropriate methodology, of an election campaign in Romania, and will be finalized with a book, which is to be published in the first half of 2010.

The theoretical background is the agenda-setting theory, with a focus on the main effects investigated nowadays: framing and priming. Methodologically speaking, three methods will be used: content analysis, semiotic and discourse analysis and in-depth interview. This book aims at offering a scientific analysis of the presidential campaign, revealing with a critical eye the mechanisms of the political campaign. The book will not be however rigidly circumscribed by the mass communication theories, of news and political debates analyzed for an elitist public, exclusively interested by the rigors of scientific research. The book will be accessible to a large audience, to whom will be only presented the major references in the field, without an excessive academic literature, offering a lot of examples, for an easy understanding of the investigated phenomena. A special public of this book will be the campaign staffs, to whom this book could be a tool for further practice.