No News is Good News (or at least Most News is Bad News): Asymmetric Responses to Economic Information

There is a considerable body of work suggesting that economic news has significant political and economic implications. Most work in political science assumes that responses to this news are symmetrical, however; indeed, this work also assumes that responses to the economy itself are symmetrical. This is most likely not true. There is, rather, reason to believe that negative economic information has a much greater impact on both news and opinion than positive economic information. This hypothesis is tested here, using time series analyses of British public opinion, newspaper content, and economic indicators. Strong evidence is found of asymmetric responsiveness. These results are analysed and discussed as they pertain to research on agenda-setting, priming, voting behaviour, economic policy, and the economy itself. Paper prepared for presentation in the “Political Agenda-setting and the Media” workshop at European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops, Uppsala, Sweden, April 13-18 2004. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by McGill University. The author is grateful to Michelle Meyer and Althia Raj for help with data-gathering and coding, and to Dietlind Stolle and Jim EngleWarnick for comments on earlier drafts. The usual disclaimer applies.