Collaborative Research: Mass Media and Representative Democracy

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

General Abstract This project examines the role of mass media in the functioning of representative democratic government. It focuses on the frequency, accuracy, and clarity of policy cues in media content. It also explores how the public uses these cues to inform their preferences for policy in the US. The investigators begin with three important propositions. First, a responsive democratic public requires only basic levels of knowledge about policy and policy change. Second,the necessary information is (in some domains) readily available in media content. Third, citizens pick up on these cues and adjust their policy preferences accordingly. This project tests these propositions, leveraging differences in media coverage across policy areas drawing upon multiple news outlets in different regions of the country to understand variation in the opinion-policy link. The investigators hypothesize that there are areas where media coverage provides a reasonably accurate view of policy, and others in which media content is lacking. The accuracy of public perceptions of, and preferences for, policy should benefit or suffer accordingly. This project provides a unique, "big" data-driven investigation into how (and when, and why) representative democracy works. Technical Abstract The centerpiece of this project is an automated content-analytic dataset comprised millions of news stories and television news transcripts on US public policy, across a range of spending areas, over the past 35 years. News content is drawn from full-text databases (primarily Lexis-Nexis) and analyzed using both dictionary and machine-learning approaches. The reliability and validity of the method is tested through human coding. These content-analytic data are examined alongside existing budgetary time series and opinion polling. Analyses offer the first large-scale exploration into the kinds of policy information that do, and do not, appear in media coverage. This will allow the team to assess how the policy preferences of individuals might change depending on the policy-relevant media content they consume. As part of the assessment of this influence, the team will provide a direct comparison of media coverage of policy and actual policy across eight policy areas. Results provide a new and unique view into the role that media play in representative democracy, particularly in public responsiveness to policy, across issue areas and over time.