Media Coverage of Politicians and the Popularity of Search Queries on Google: Evidence from Five Countries

The media coverage of politicians has received substantial scholarly attention in the study of political communication. However, the consequences of media visibility for political information-seeking among the public has not been the subject of much empirical research. Combining an original dataset of over 3 million news stories from 15 national newspapers in Belgium, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and the UK, the biographies of nearly 1,500 members of parliament (MPs) and data on their search popularity on Google from the period of 2005-2019, we examine the extent to which representatives’ media visibility affects their search popularity. Our results show that while politicians’ news visibility is positively associated with their popularity in Google search queries, this association is substantially stronger among MPs of ethnic minority background and female MPs. These results have important implications for the role of identity in political communication and democratic processes.