Scandals, Regulation, and Media Coverage: The Role of Public Opinion

• In Event: How Information Affects Economic Policy Preferences

Abstract

We know from the work on political agenda setting that regulatory policies are often adopted after scandals. What is the role of media coverage and public opinion in this process? This paper presents survey experimental results from a 4-country study of regulatory preferences. Drawing on nationally representative samples, we test the pre-registered proposition that media coverage of corporate scandals is more effective at moving both general and domain-specific regulatory preferences than apparently more structural, and therefore politically relevant, coverage: that based on perceived unfairness that falls short of outright malfeasance (windfall taxation and corporate tax ‘planning’) or attempts by economic interests to capture politics through lobbying. We explore this proposition by comparing the effects of authentic media treatments in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States in three sectors: energy, finance, and technology. We further compare these effects with a baseline general media treatment that combines unfairness and political capture, which we expect to have effects on redistributive but not on regulatory preferences.

Authors

• Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford

• Taeku Lee, Harvard University

• Ryan Shandler