Media in the Policy Process: Using Framing and Narratives to Understand Policy Influences

Policy scholarship has long sought to understand the role of knowledge and information in the policy process. Of the actors, institutions, and resources involved in shaping policy processes and outcomes, media and narratives have been incorporated into empirical policy scholarship and theories with varying success. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a framework through which scholars can bring analysis of narratives into studies of policy making. The NPF moves the field forward in understanding the role of narratives, communication, and stakeholder beliefs in the policy process, while at the same time striving for theoretical rigor. We embed the discussion of frames and narratives in the NPF to provide an empirical and theoretical cohesion to our understanding of media and public policy and then provide a brief empirical example of how such an integration may prove fruitful for policy scholars.     

消费增长与财政政策取向

促进消费稳定增长,是我国财政政策的着眼点之一。由于居民收入不确定性因素的增加、收入差距过大和个人所得税不完善、税收政策偏重于向投资倾斜、财政支出结构不合理等因素的综合作用,我国居民消费率偏低,投资与消费的矛盾不断加剧。因此,必须调整财政政策,树立正确的财政指导思想,优化税制,完善社会保障与复式预算制度,调整财政支出结构,实现财政政策的政策性转变。     

The Policy Dynamics of the Trans‐Alaska Pipeline System

Since 1977, oil produced in northern Alaska has posed a major environmental threat across large areas of Alaska while simultaneously playing a dominant role in the economy of Alaska. This enduring dilemma was created by the building of the Trans‐Alaska Pipeline System to transport oil produced on the North Slope of Alaska, a region containing the largest oil field ever developed in North America. The Trans‐Alaska Pipeline System transports oil through an 800‐mile pipeline and ocean‐going oil tankers. This complex technological system poses an enduring risk of environmentally damaging oil spills in Alaska. This study applies the punctuated equilibrium theory of policy change to examine the processes and enduring consequences of the national policy reforms that allowed the building of the Trans‐Alaska Pipeline System.     

Dynamic Representation(s): Federal Criminal Justice Policy and an Alternative Dimension of Public Mood

Does public policy respond to public opinion? Previous research suggests dynamic representation occurs in the aggregate. Yet, most of the evidence for policy response is limited to the policy intentions of elected officials on issues related to more or less government spending. We examine policy response to an alternative dimension of public mood, public preferences for more or less punitive criminal justice policies, using multiple indicators of policy from various stages of the policy-making process. Criminal justice policy should be responsive to public preferences given the public’s concern about crime and the negative social construction of criminals. Thus, there is an electoral incentive for public officials to respond to public preferences along this alternative dimension of public sentiment regarding criminal justice policy. We estimate a DYMIMIC model of federal criminal justice policy as a function of the multiple dimensions of public policy mood using Kalman filtering. The results indicate that criminal justice policy responds to the second, not the first, dimension of public mood. We find evidence that policy-makers at multiple stages of the policy process are able to differentiate among multiple signals from the public and respond appropriately. The results present a more sophisticated portrait of democratic responsiveness.     

财政政策与居民消费需求:非线性效应与效应的非对称性

财政政策的凯恩斯效应与新古典效应之争是理论界研究的前沿问题之一.本文认为财政政策对居民消费需求的凯恩斯效应与新古典效应并非相互排斥,反而更有可能相互共存,因此,探讨不同财政时期究竞何种效应处于支配地位才是解决问题的关键.本文首先分别运用凯恩斯和新古典两种理论诊释财政政策工具对居民消费需求的作用机制,然后通过建立居民消费需求的固定效应变截距面板数据模型,并以24个OECD发达国家1980-2007年的跨国数据为例,实证检验了政府消费、税收和转移支付对居民消费需求的影响效应.研究发现:一是政府消费、税收和转移支付在扩张或紧缩两个特殊时期存在显著的非线性效应;二是虽然财政政策工具对居民消费需求的总效应通常都表现为凯恩斯效应,但特殊时期转移支付的总效应则为非凯恩斯效应;三是政府消费、税收与转移支付对居民消费需求的效应在扩张与紧缩两个特殊时期之间有显著的非对称性.     

Making Austerity Popular: The Media and Mass Attitudes toward Fiscal Policy

What explains variation in individual attitudes toward government deficits? Although macroeconomic stance is of paramount importance for contemporary governments, our understanding of its popular politics is limited. We argue that popular attitudes regarding austerity are influenced by media (and wider elite) framing. Information necessary to form preferences on the deficit is not provided neutrally, and its provision shapes how voters understand their interests. A wide range of evidence from Britain between 2010 and 2015 supports this claim. In the British Election Study, deficit attitudes vary systematically with the source of news consumption, even controlling for party identification. A structural topic model of two major newspapers' reporting shows that content varies systematically with respect to coverage of public borrowing—in ways that intuitively accord with the attitudes of their readership. Finally, a survey experiment suggests causation from media to attitudes: deficit preferences change based on the presentation of deficit information.     

Lesson-Drawing in Family Policy: Media Reports and Empirical Evidence about European Developments

Since 1980, the U.S. press has painted a vivid picture of widespread welfare state dismantling in Europe. Yet our analysis of social expenditures in 14 European countries from 1980–1995 finds a pattern of resilience and, with respect to family benefits, a pattern of expansion. Our review of qualitative research on policy reforms upholds the expenditure-based findings. We conclude that U.S. media misrepresentation of social welfare developments in Europe is likely to impede lesson-drawing from abroad by U.S. policymakers. This constitutes a lost opportunity, as the U.S. is now engaged in social policy reformulation, especially with respect to programs for families.     

The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014

Applying a dynamic latent‐variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936–2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross‐sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states steadily increased between the 1930s and 1970s and then largely plateaued. The policy liberalism of most states has remained stable in relative terms, though several states have shifted considerably over time. We also find surprisingly little evidence of multidimensionality in state policy outputs. Our new estimates of state policy liberalism have broad application to the study of political development, representation, accountability, and other important issues in political science.     

The Divergent Worlds of New Media: How Policy Shapes Work in the Creative Economy1

“New media” workers have joined the creative economy as digital designers, web page designers, and producers of entertainment products. Like many creative commodity producers, their work lies at the intersection of the technical (in this case code writing) and the expressive (through design). It reflects the tensions inherent in this intersection and the conflicts common to many creative workers who produce commodities but whose work also reflects some element of personal expression or authorship. The ways in which these tensions are resolved is central to the formation of new occupational and professional identities. Cultural economy perspectives offer us insights into the subjective experience of the tensions associated with creative work. They become more powerful, however, when combined with an understanding of the policy context in which new media has evolved. Drawing on both cultural economy and policy analysis approaches, I argue that while new media work emerged in conjunction with new technologies and reflects the tensions between technical applications and design, it also is a product of changes in broader regulatory frameworks that have shaped the work-world of new media. The “regulatory difference” has produced considerable variation in the occupational identities of new media workers among advanced economies. In some economies, new media work is evolving in a form that is closer to that of the professional, whereas in the United States it is better described as an entrepreneurial activity in which new media workers sell skills and services in a market. To make this argument I examine findings from the growing body of international work on new media but focus on the particularities of the United States case. What this evidence indicates is that the character of new media occupations is defined as much by the policy context within which it emerges as by the technology it uses.     

Changing Agendas in Australian Indigenous Policy: Federalism,Competing Principles and Generational Dynamics

This paper identifies two periods of punctuated change in the content and style of Australian Indigenous policy in the last fifty years. It also identifies a third period in which attention to Indigenous policy was heightened through the nationalisation of land issues already well‐established on the agendas of sub‐national jurisdictions. The paper relates all three periods to the changing federal institutions of Australian Indigenous policy, with the Commonwealth slowly exploring its post‐1967 role as a national government in Indigenous affairs. In later sections, the paper identifies some more conceptual bases of changing policy agendas, through ideas of the competing principles of equality, choice and guardianship and the generational moral dynamics of Indigenous affairs.     

改革开放以来我国住房政策变迁的动力分析——以多源流理论为视角

多源流理论作为一种重要的政策变迁理论,为我们探讨改革开放以来我国住房政策变迁的动力提供了一种比较有效的分析视角和分析工具.问题之窗与政治之窗的打开都能为改革开放以来我国住房政策的变迁提供机会,但有些住房政策变迁情形也可能是起因于方案可行性程度的提高.另外,改革开放以来我国住房政策的变迁有赖于问题源流、政策源流和政治源流的交汇,即问题、政策方案与政治形势三者的有机结合.在运用多源流理论对改革开放以来我国住房政策变迁的动力进行分析的基础上,可以构建出一个政策变迁动力模式,这一模式包含五种政策变迁动力因素:问题的变化、方案可行性的增强、政治形势的变化、外部事件的冲击、正面政策效果的积累.这五种因素从不同的方面启示了政府应如何更好地推进我国住房政策的变迁.     

Punctuating Which Equilibrium? Understanding Thermostatic Policy Dynamics in Pacific Northwest Forestry

A key theme among seminal contributions to policy studies, including Baumgartner and Jones (1993; 2002) , Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) , and Hall (1989; 1993) , is that "external perturbations" outside of the policy subsystem, characterized by some type of societal upheaval, are critical for explaining the development of profound and durable policy changes which are otherwise prevented by institutional stability. We argue that these assumptions, while useful for assessing many cases of policy change, do not adequately capture historical patterns of forest policy development in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Differences in policy development concerning state and federal regulation of private and public forest lands governing the same problem, region, and population challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy on policy dynamics. To address this puzzle, we revisit and expand existing taxonomies identifying the levels and processes of change that policies undergo. This exercise reveals the existence of a "thermostatic" institutional setting governing policy development on federal lands that was absent in the institutions governing private lands. This thermostatic institutional arrangement contained durable policy objectives that required policy settings to undergo major change in order to maintain the institution's defining characteristics. Policy scientists need to distinguish such "hard institutions" that necessitate paradigmatic changes in policy settings from those that do not permit them.     

Interest Group Competition over Policy Outcomes: Dynamics,Strategic Behavior,and Social Costs

This paper analyzes a two-period model of interestgroup competition between two groups to affect thepolicy outcome. The paper characterizes the subgameperfect equilibrium and considers the welfareimplications of the model. The subgame perfectequilibrium to this game is allocatively efficient ifand only if the initial equilibrium is allocativelyefficient and interest groups are equally adept atproducing political pressure. When rent seeking isconstitutionally protected, the notion of rent-seekingconstrained efficiency is defined as the cooperativesolution to the rent-seeking game. It is shown that arent-seeking constrained efficient equilibrium isattainable by forcing winners in political competitionto fully compensate losers.     

Dynamics of Social Policy Change: A Korean Case Study from a Comparative Perspective

Most of the existing literature on dynamics of social policy change was developed against the background of the Western liberal democratic political regimes. This study examines the application of these existing studies to the experience of the East Asian newly industrialized countries. Special attention is paid to two social policy problems of South Korea—the problems of low wage levels and compensation for pollution victims. Because of authoritarian government and a strongly autonomous state, the Korean cases show a pattern of policy changes primarily driven by a particular set of interests—the state elites' perceived political survival needs and their reputation in international society, with environmental factors and policy legacies playing a supplementary role. Also, in spite of state elites' reluctance to adopt social policy measures, the Korean cases show a pattern of policy developments away from the residual towards the institutional model. The results of this study suggest that, despite some differences between the social policy systems of the East Asian countries, the existing literature on social policy change has considerable potential for application to those countries. At the same time, however, the literature has a limited capacity for fully accommodating the East Asian experience, which stimulates political scientists to develop generalizations in a wider international context.