ABSTRACT This paper reports results from an application of Thomas Schelling’s (1960) concept of a... more ABSTRACT This paper reports results from an application of Thomas Schelling’s (1960) concept of a focal point to the measure of social agreement on the received tone of media content. In our experiments, subjects rate the tone, positive, negative, or neutral, of newspaper articles and news broadcasts, with an incentive to coordinate responses. We compare the content analysis of a traditional subject pool with those of a representative cross-section of the general public. Our application of the coordination game with strategy labels illustrates that the concept of a focal point can be put to use as a measure of social agreement. Le document présente les résultats obtenus en appliquant le concept de point focal, avancé par Thomas Schelling (1960), à la mesure de l’accord social concernant la perception du ton qui se dégage du contenu médiatique. Dans le cadre des expériences mises sur pied, les sujets évaluent le ton, positif, négatif ou neutre, adopté dans des articles de journaux et des bulletins de nouvelles et sont encouragés, par des mesures incitatives, à coordonner leurs réponses. Nous comparons l’analyse du contenu réalisée par un bassin traditionnel de sujets à celle menée par un échantillon représentatif du grand public. Notre application du jeu de coordination faisant appel à des étiquettes de stratégies démontre que la notion de point focal peut être utilisée pour mesurer l’accord social.
ABSTRACT Economic perceptions affect policy preferences and government support. It thus matters t... more ABSTRACT Economic perceptions affect policy preferences and government support. It thus matters that these perceptions are driven by factors other than the economy, including media coverage. We nevertheless know little about how media reflect economic trends, and whether they influence (or are influenced by) public economic perceptions. This article explores the economy, media, and public opinion, focusing in particular on whether media coverage and the public react to changes in or levels of economic activity, and the past, present, or future economy. Analyses rely on content-analytic data drawn from 30,000 news stories over 30 years in the United States. Results indicate that coverage reflects change in the future economy, and that this both influences and is influenced by public evaluations. These patterns make more understandable the somewhat surprising finding of positive coverage and public assessments in the midst of the Great Recession. They also may help explain previous findings in political behavior.
ABSTRACT Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination coun... more ABSTRACT Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination countries? Existing work is divided. This paper examines the manner and extent to which increases in immigration are related to welfare state retrenchment, drawing on data from 1970 to 2007. The paper makes three contributions: (1) it explores the impact of changes in immigration on social welfare policy over both the short and medium term; (2) it examines the possibility that immigration matters for spending not just directly, but indirectly, through changes in demographics and/or the labour force; and (3) by disaggregating data on social expenditure into subdomains (including unemployment, pensions, and the like), it tests the impact of immigration on different elements of the welfare state. Results suggest that increased immigration is indeed associated with smaller increases in spending. The major pathway is through impact on female labour force participation. The policy domains most affected are ones subject to moral hazard, or at least to rhetoric about moral hazard.
The introduction of television cameras in legislatures met, in many countries, with serious debat... more The introduction of television cameras in legislatures met, in many countries, with serious debate about the potential benefits and costs of broadcasting legislative debate. There were concerns about tendency for cameras to produce less focused, more attention-seeking behaviour amongst party members, and especially leaders. This work draws together the literatures on televising debates, and on personalisation, to explore the impact of introduction of cameras in the Canadian House of Commons. Analyses are based on content analytic database of over 11,000 questions asked from 1957 to 2004; they suggest no discernible impact of cameras on House debates. These results are discussed as they pertain to both the current literature on personalisation, and the design of legislative institutions and communication policies.
Until recently, the Policy Agendas community has focused on human coding texts using the policy a... more Until recently, the Policy Agendas community has focused on human coding texts using the policy agendas codebook. When researchers have needed to code more texts than is feasible or cost-e ffective, they have turned to machine learning methods. In contrast, we propose an automated dictionary-based content analysis approach for replicating the policy agendas codes for English and Dutch texts. We validate the dictionaries several ways. For the English-language dictionary, we use data from Prime Minister's Question Time (from the United Kingdom) and the State of the Union speeches (from the United States), both human-coded for each country's respective codebooks. For the Dutch-language dictionary, we compare the results to media content from Belgium previously coded using the Policy Agendas codes. Results suggest that these two dictionaries may produce valid, reliable and comparable measures of policy agendas, and that may be is possible to create similar dictionaries for other languages.
ABSTRACT This paper reports results from an application of Thomas Schelling’s (1960) concept of a... more ABSTRACT This paper reports results from an application of Thomas Schelling’s (1960) concept of a focal point to the measure of social agreement on the received tone of media content. In our experiments, subjects rate the tone, positive, negative, or neutral, of newspaper articles and news broadcasts, with an incentive to coordinate responses. We compare the content analysis of a traditional subject pool with those of a representative cross-section of the general public. Our application of the coordination game with strategy labels illustrates that the concept of a focal point can be put to use as a measure of social agreement. Le document présente les résultats obtenus en appliquant le concept de point focal, avancé par Thomas Schelling (1960), à la mesure de l’accord social concernant la perception du ton qui se dégage du contenu médiatique. Dans le cadre des expériences mises sur pied, les sujets évaluent le ton, positif, négatif ou neutre, adopté dans des articles de journaux et des bulletins de nouvelles et sont encouragés, par des mesures incitatives, à coordonner leurs réponses. Nous comparons l’analyse du contenu réalisée par un bassin traditionnel de sujets à celle menée par un échantillon représentatif du grand public. Notre application du jeu de coordination faisant appel à des étiquettes de stratégies démontre que la notion de point focal peut être utilisée pour mesurer l’accord social.
ABSTRACT Economic perceptions affect policy preferences and government support. It thus matters t... more ABSTRACT Economic perceptions affect policy preferences and government support. It thus matters that these perceptions are driven by factors other than the economy, including media coverage. We nevertheless know little about how media reflect economic trends, and whether they influence (or are influenced by) public economic perceptions. This article explores the economy, media, and public opinion, focusing in particular on whether media coverage and the public react to changes in or levels of economic activity, and the past, present, or future economy. Analyses rely on content-analytic data drawn from 30,000 news stories over 30 years in the United States. Results indicate that coverage reflects change in the future economy, and that this both influences and is influenced by public evaluations. These patterns make more understandable the somewhat surprising finding of positive coverage and public assessments in the midst of the Great Recession. They also may help explain previous findings in political behavior.
ABSTRACT Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination coun... more ABSTRACT Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination countries? Existing work is divided. This paper examines the manner and extent to which increases in immigration are related to welfare state retrenchment, drawing on data from 1970 to 2007. The paper makes three contributions: (1) it explores the impact of changes in immigration on social welfare policy over both the short and medium term; (2) it examines the possibility that immigration matters for spending not just directly, but indirectly, through changes in demographics and/or the labour force; and (3) by disaggregating data on social expenditure into subdomains (including unemployment, pensions, and the like), it tests the impact of immigration on different elements of the welfare state. Results suggest that increased immigration is indeed associated with smaller increases in spending. The major pathway is through impact on female labour force participation. The policy domains most affected are ones subject to moral hazard, or at least to rhetoric about moral hazard.
The introduction of television cameras in legislatures met, in many countries, with serious debat... more The introduction of television cameras in legislatures met, in many countries, with serious debate about the potential benefits and costs of broadcasting legislative debate. There were concerns about tendency for cameras to produce less focused, more attention-seeking behaviour amongst party members, and especially leaders. This work draws together the literatures on televising debates, and on personalisation, to explore the impact of introduction of cameras in the Canadian House of Commons. Analyses are based on content analytic database of over 11,000 questions asked from 1957 to 2004; they suggest no discernible impact of cameras on House debates. These results are discussed as they pertain to both the current literature on personalisation, and the design of legislative institutions and communication policies.
Until recently, the Policy Agendas community has focused on human coding texts using the policy a... more Until recently, the Policy Agendas community has focused on human coding texts using the policy agendas codebook. When researchers have needed to code more texts than is feasible or cost-e ffective, they have turned to machine learning methods. In contrast, we propose an automated dictionary-based content analysis approach for replicating the policy agendas codes for English and Dutch texts. We validate the dictionaries several ways. For the English-language dictionary, we use data from Prime Minister's Question Time (from the United Kingdom) and the State of the Union speeches (from the United States), both human-coded for each country's respective codebooks. For the Dutch-language dictionary, we compare the results to media content from Belgium previously coded using the Policy Agendas codes. Results suggest that these two dictionaries may produce valid, reliable and comparable measures of policy agendas, and that may be is possible to create similar dictionaries for other languages.
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Papers by Stuart Soroka