Taking it personal or national? Understanding the indirect effects of economic news on government support

Abstract

This article studies the impact of economic news on government support and the mediating role of people's national (sociotropic) and personal (egotropic) economic evaluations. Employing two complementary studies, a large literature is contributed to by adding a media perspective to the economic voting hypothesis. The first study was fielded in 2015 and combines an extensive content analysis of economic news (print, television, online; N ¼ 5,630) with a three-wave panel survey (N ¼ 3,240). As a follow-up, an experiment was conducted in 2018 exposing participants (N ¼ 1,452) to negative and positive economic news. Both studies confirm that the tone of news directly affects national economic evaluations but not personal ones. Whereas both types of evaluation predict government support, the effect of national evaluations is significantly stronger. Most importantly, it is shown that the effect of national evaluations on government support is actually a mediation of the effect of economic news.

How media content influences economic expectations: Evidence from a global expert survey

“…Appelgren et al (2019) focus on the interplay of economic activity and the media coverage of the economy. Damstra et al (2021) combine an extensive analysis of news content with a panel survey and an experiment and are able to show that economic news directly affects national economic evaluations but not personal ones. That news has an impact on consumer confidence and therefore most likely on real economic activity is a result put forward by Boukes et al (2019).…”

Household Debt Rate Management in a Credit Economy: An Empirical Review of South African Context

“…These variables as extracted from previous literature includes but not limited to economic information, political situation, and demographic influence. According to Damstra, Boukes and Vliegenthart (2019), economic information such as prices of goods and services, inflation rate, lending rate, real interest rate, direction of economic growth to mention but few, impacts significantly on the financial decisions of an individual. Perhaps, good grasp of economic information provides households with potential knowledge to manage their earnings and provide for savings.…”

“…Perhaps, as government, corporation and nongovernment organisation use demographics to understand more about a populations characteristic for several purposes such as, policy and economic development, however, at the household level, individuals also employ same concept when taking financial decision that will benefit their entire family. Besides, consideration of demographic variables when planning for household financial well-being according to Damstra et al (2019) presents a coherent financial decision on income, credit and expenditure management for not only the immediate family but also the extended family members. To this end, the influential variables of one's demography becomes inevitable of consideration when taking up credit facilities, as credit repayment are spread into generation of years.…”

Does public broadcasting increase voter turnout? Evidence from the roll out of BBC radio in the 1920s

“…Many existing studies deploy individuallevel survey data to examine effects, making it unclear whether exposure is merely a function of unobserved characteristics of the exposed (Prat and Strömberg 2013;Guess et al 2019). For scholars that analyse the media through an "effects of causes" framework (Mahoney and Goertz 2006), one solution is to bring exposure under the control of the researcher, through experiments in the field (Gerber, Karlan, and Bergan 2009;Conroy-Krutz and Moehler 2015), lab (Iyengar and Kinder 1987;Levendusky 2013) or in surveys (Goodwin, Hix, and Pickup 2020;Damstra, Boukes, and Vliegenthart 2021). However the implications of these studies only travel so far.…”