Are All Policy Decisions Equal? Explaining the Variation in Media Coverage of the UK Budget

Abstract

A country's Budget is one of the most important public policy instruments, as it establishes the government's policy priorities and has the potential to determine winners and losers. The Budget, however, is a mixture of different components and these get varying degrees of attention in the media. Drawing on sociology of news research, this paper seeks to explain this heterogeneous coverage of a Budget's policy decisions. To do so, it uses a unique dataset of over 5,000 articles of press coverage of six UK Budgets (2008Budgets ( -2012. These articles are coded for the presence/absence of each of the Budget's policy decision, via automated content analysis. Based on a multivariate negative binomial model we find that the salience of a policy decision in the coverage is determined by its cost; whether it is negative (i.e. tax hikes and spending cuts) or positive; the income group that is most affected by it; and the level of attention given to it by the government.1 The order of the authors' names is in alphabetical order. Both authors have contributed equally to all work. The authors would like to thank Yigal Harkavy for his invaluable research assistance. We are also grateful toSarah Birch, Heike Klüver, Peter Van Aelst, Shaun Bevan, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions which helped improve the manuscript. IntroductionThe Budget presentation and approval process is a key element of the policy process. However, given the high impact that budgets can have for a country and its politics, it is surprising that little has been devoted to the media coverage. This is the more important because, as research has consistently shown, the politics of attention are crucial (Baumgartner and Jones 2005), and the media-for whom, as for other actors, attention is scarce-often plays a key role in these dynamics. Moreover, previous research has found that the media is highly selective about which aspects of the policy process it reports (Van Aelst et al. n/d).In the case of the Budget, the issues that it covers are evidently already on the policy agenda. Increases and decreases in budgetary spending, for instance, are tied to issue preferences of legislators (Mortensen 2009), even if these are constrained (Epp, Lovett and Baumgartner 2014). Which of these policy initiatives, however, does the public get to know about? We argue that the issues that remain on the agenda, and those that disappear into the background, will partly depend on the degree of coverage. Moreover, this will be tied to how attractive different policy decisions are for the media. As such, it is important to understand: which items of the Budget do the media pay attention to? And how can this be explained?In order to answer these questions, this paper draws on research on news values as well as commercial imperatives and media-source relations to explore the 'selection bias' of the media reporting of the Budget in the UK. Specifically, the paper will identify the key determinants that explain the difference in the amount ...

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