Framing the Bankers: Media and Public Attitudes on the Australian Bank Scandal

• In Event: Information, Media and Policy Attitudes in a Populist Age

Abstract

This paper uses a survey experimental design to explore the effects of different media frames on issue salience, policy preferences, and behavioral intentions in the area of financial regulation. In line with this year’s conference theme of populism and privilege, our paper focuses on popular outrage against large banks and their leaders, drawing on a series of banking scandals in Australia that resulted in the appointment of a parliamentary commission (the Banking Royal Commission), which over the course of 2018 brought the issue of bank regulation to the forefront of Australian politics.

We commissioned an original online survey of adult Australians just after the final set of hearings of the Commission to try to understand the way in which popular outrage at perceived financial abuses translate into changed policy preferences and changed intentions for political action. We posit that how mass publics are informed on a given issue – specifically, how media institutions frame their accounts of banks and bankers – will play a crucial role in whether and how an issue catches the public’s eye (Harrell et al. 2016, Barnes and Hicks 2018).

Based on a computational analysis of the Banking Royal Commission hearings, we focused on the prevalence of blame attribution (Iyengar 1991, Malhotra and Kuo 2008), identifying the two “blame frames” most used in press coverage: one that blamed banks and one that blamed regulators. We constructed a survey experiment in which respondents were asked to read a newspaper story on the banking crisis with exposure to one of the two pure frames as well as one article that included both frames in a single article. Our set-up allows us to speak both to the differential effects of the two blame frames and as to whether competing frames cancel each other out (Druckman 2010), in terms of their effects on affect toward elite actors and institutions; issue salience; blame attribution; policy preferences; and behavioral intentions.

Authors

• Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford

• Taeku Lee, University of California, Berkeley