News Priming and the Changing Economy: How Economic News Influences Government Evaluations (original) (raw)
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A Cross-National Analysis of the Causes and Consequences of Economic News
Social Science Quarterly
Objective. Work on economic news argues that U.S. coverage focuses primarily on changes rather than levels of future economic conditions; it also both affects and reflects public economic sentiment. Given that economic perceptions are related to policy preferences and government support, this is of consequence for politics. This article explores the generalizability of these findings. Methods. Using nearly 100,000 stories over 30 years in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, we compare media tone, public opinion, and economic conditions. Result. Analyses demonstrate that media tone and public opinion follow future economic change in all three countries. Media and opinion are also related, but the effect mostly runs from the public to the media, not the other way around. Conclusion. These results confirm the generalizability of prior findings, and the importance of considering more than a simple unidirectional link between media coverage and public economic sentiment.
Assessing the Relationship between Economic News Coverage and Mass Economic Attitudes
Political Research Quarterly
Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account the economy itself, a substantial relationship between media tone and economic attitudes persists. Given that economic attitudes influence a wide variety of political outcomes, this finding carries important normative and political significance.
Covering the crisis: Media coverage of the economic crisis and citizens' economic expectations
The 2008-2009 worldwide economic crisis serves as a backdrop to this study of the dynamics of citizens' economic expectations. Economic expectations are identified as crucial for a range of political attitudes. This study is the first to consider how information affects evaluations in times of a severe crisis, as prior research of information effects on economic evaluations took place in more stable economic times. It links citizens' news exposure and the content of economic news coverage with changes in prospective economic assessments. Drawing on a three-wave panel study and on a media content analysis between the panel waves, we thus provide a dynamic assessment of media influences on changes in economic evaluations. The results demonstrate that media exposure strongly affected expectations regarding the future development of the national economic situation, while being largely unrelated to personal economic expectations. We furthermore show that media dependency increases the magnitude of the media effect. We discuss the disconnect between personal and national economic evaluations with regard to mass-mediated economic information.
European Political Science Review, 2014
This study investigates priming effects during the global financial crisis that erupted in September 2008. Using two longitudinal data sources on public opinion dynamics in Sweden between 2007 and 2010, we find no evidence of a basic priming hypothesis. Drawing upon the distinction between accessibility and applicability mechanisms, however, additional analysis indicates that priming of economic considerations was moderated by citizens' attributions of responsibility for current economic developments. These results support the notion of priming as a two-step process, whereby heavy news coverage of the financial crisis increases the accessibility of economic considerations among the audience, but whether these considerations are used in government approval assessments depends on their perceived applicability as well.
Economic News and Partisan Bias in Economic Perceptions
Decades of research establish the direct influence of partisanship on voter perception of a host of real-world conditions. That is, those identifying with the party of the incumbent tend to perceive a range of social and economic conditions in a manner favourable to the incumbent’s re-election, while those identifying with opposition parties tend to judge conditions in ways that justify “throwing the rascals out”. Even so, numerous factors have been found to moderate this “partisan bias”. We examine one plausible moderator: the volume of objectively diagnostic and perceptually relevant information that is generated by the mass media. It is intuitive that the availability of such information should influence the magnitude of biased perception. There is, furthermore, solid theoretical grounding for the proposition that partisan bias depends on, as Bernard Berelson and colleagues put it, “a certain degree of ambiguity in the objective situation being perceived”. Yet these propositions have rarely been investigated systematically, either by political scientists or psychologists, and what evidence as does exist is mixed. Our paper investigates the moderation of partisan bias by informational conditions through a focus on the impact of economic news on economic perceptions during five Canadian general elections (1988 to 2004). We combine survey data from the Canadian Election Studies with an extensive database of content-coded election stories from leading newspapers. In keeping with existing literature, we find a mixed pattern: we observe bias-reduction in two elections, no impact on bias in two elections, and an increase in bias in one election.
Sources of Economic News and Economic Expectations
American Politics Research, 2010
This article considers the process by which local economic news coverage influences individual evaluations of the economy. We improve on prior research by capturing a wider range of news sources (including national network news, national newspapers, local television news, and local newspapers) and connecting the effects of this coverage on individual level attitudes. We find that current personal financial evaluations, personal financial expectations, and short-term (12-month) expectations for the U.S. economy are related to national network coverage. Local television coverage of the economy is related to personal financial evaluations but not short-term economic expectations and local print news is important in structuring expectations of future business conditions. Overall, the findings illustrate important differences in economic coverage across media outlets and the effects of these differences on economic expectations. Exposure to different sources of economic information have ...