Dataset for: Measuring mediated deliberation in a comparative perspective: An analysis of Italian, French and Spanish newspapers

Mediated deliberation represents an innovative research approach. It aims to investigate whether and to what extent media may contribute to the public debate by offering deliberative elements. According to Mediated deliberation, indeed, media should facilitate public discussion by providing a coverage focused on the specific contents of the issue, by emphasising pluralism, namely offering visibility to all actors involved in decision making process and by offering argumentations. This paper investigates press mediated deliberation by presenting the results of a comparative research on Italy, France and Spain. The corpus of the analyzed articles amounts to 2,074 units from 15 widely circulated newspapers (five for each country) over a period of one month of monitoring. The mediated deliberation of newspapers has been assessed through the “Newspaper Policy Index”, which takes into account: (a) the inclusiveness of the journalistic coverage, (b) recourse to argumentation and (c) the amount of attention devoted to articles focused on public policies. Our findings suggest the existence of a significant differentiation among the three countries. Even if the three case studies are ascribable the Mediterranean journalism model (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), French newspapers seem to be characterized by a higher degree of deliberative quality if compared to the Italian and Spanish newspapers. We provide here the dataset used for analyses, for any further info (i.e. recoding, filter variables...) please contact: [e-mail] or [e-mail]