Banklash: How Media Coverage of Bank Scandals Moves Mass Preferences on Financial Regulation

Financial regulation is often adopted in the wake of scandals and crises. Yet political science has little to say about the political effects of corporate scandals. We break that silence, asking whether exposure to news coverage of bank scandals changes the preferences of voters for financial regula...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAmerican journal of political science Vol. 68; no. 2; pp. 427 - 444
Main Authors Culpepper, Pepper D., Jung, Jae‐Hee, Lee, Taeku
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.04.2024
Subjects
Experiments
Mass media
Media coverage
Panel data
Political economy
Political science
Polls & surveys
Public finance
Public opinion
Regulation of financial institutions
Scandals
Voters
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Summary:Financial regulation is often adopted in the wake of scandals and crises. Yet political science has little to say about the political effects of corporate scandals. We break that silence, asking whether exposure to news coverage of bank scandals changes the preferences of voters for financial regulation. Drawing from the literatures on media influence and public opinion, we argue that news coverage of bank scandals should increase voters’ appetite for regulation. We test our hypothesis with data from six countries, using original nationally representative panel surveys with embedded experiments (total N = 27,673). Our pooled and country‐specific analyses largely support our expectation that exposure to news coverage of scandals increases regulatory preferences. We reproduce this finding in a separate survey wave, using different scandals than in our original analysis. These results contribute to studies on media influence on public opinion, the political significance of scandals, and the political economy of regulation.
Bibliography:We are grateful for insightful comments from Andy Eggers, Patrick Emmenegger, Emiliano Grossman, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors. We received helpful feedback at presentations at Nuffield College, Berkeley Law School, the London School of Economics, the 2021 meeting of the Council for European Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, and the University of Hamburg. For fantastic research assistance, we thank Clemence Hautefort, Robin Hsieh, Hayley Pring, and David Weisstanner. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 787887). This article reflects only the authors’ views and not those of the ERC. This project received ethics approval from the University of Oxford (BSG_C1A‐19‐10).
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/ajps.12752