Nothing Beats a Good Scandal: Negative News and Attitudinal Change

• In Event: Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference I: Going Negative: How Information Affects Attitudes

Abstract

Negative media coverage is often thought to be especially important in the way that people form politically relevant attitudes about the economy and economic policy. In this paper we consider three characteristic modes of negative coverage and how they influence attitudes to economic regulation: corporate scandals; state capture through corporate lobbying; and unfairness of existing policy arrangements. Using a large, 4-country panel survey, we use survey experiments to identify the effect of these types of news coverage on regulatory preferences across three different economic sectors: technology, finance, and energy. Across the combined sample we find that scandals have a larger positive effect on attitudes towards regulation than do either capture or fairness articles, regardless of whether use a between-subject (treatment-control) set-up or whether we look at within subject differences between survey waves. We further examine the mechanisms behind these changes, looking at both emotions and learning. Our findings suggest implications for which sorts of negative economic occurrences may be most likely to emerge as focal events have important implications for reforms of public policy.

Authors

• Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford

• Ryan Shandler

• Taeku Lee, Harvard University