The news media’s influence on policy responsiveness: cross- national evidence from Europe

To what extent do the news media influence policy responsiveness? While the existing empirical literature scrutinises the degree and the conditions under which policymakers respond to public opinion, a gap exists concerning the systematic analysis of the impact of news media on policy responsiveness. Here, we analyse whether changes in sentiment within news articles provide political elites with cues to shape policies in line with public opinion. Specifically, we focus on the effect of speed and extent of sentiment change in newspaper coverage on the likelihood of policy alignment with public opinion. Conceptually grounded in the rational anticipation mechanism - politicians respond to voter preferences in anticipation of electoral sanctions – the hypothesis is that heightened speed and scope of negative sentiment changes incentivise politicians to align policies with public opinion as an anticipatory strategy against negative public sentiment caused by bad press. The empirical analysis spans six European countries over the period 1980-2014, encompassing 458 implemented policies. Using a self-created dataset of more than 2.5 million news articles from 12 news agencies, R functions based on Latent Semantic Scaling are developed to create an original measure of sentiment speed and magnitude. Contrary to expectations, preliminary findings do not support the hypothesis that heightened speed of negative sentiment changes increases the likelihood of policy alignment with majority opinion. Rather, the preponderance of positive sentiment changes creates more favourable conditions for a stronger opinion-policy link. This points to a strategic use of the media by politicians, in which policy is deliberately adapted to majority opinion by anticipating positive rather than negative sentiment. Results have important implications for our understanding of responsiveness. They not only provide insights into the hitherto unexplored effect of the media on elites’ responses to public opinion but also evoke a reevaluation of the media's role against the background of increasingly selective responsiveness of political elites and its normative role for political representation more generally.