Newspapers and Budgeting: The Effects of Media Coverage on Local Expenditure Decisions.

The media play an important role for the political agenda. It is less clear, however, how strong the media impact is on political decisions. This article pursues a different approach from the one commonly used in the media–policy research tradition. Instead of focusing on the relationship between the content of the media agenda and the political agenda, it is argued here that from a broader policy perspective, media pressure on the incumbents is a more relevant variable. Media pressure is measured as media competition and media coverage. Furthermore, the article investigates the effect of media variables on budgetary decisions in different spending areas, and compares the relationships between media pressure and policy under various economic, political and institutional conditions. This allows the authors to investigate which factors hinder and promote media influence on policy. The units of analysis are the Danish municipalities, which are similar political units with different newspaper coverage. Coverage by local newspapers is intense in some municipalities, but absent in others. As expected, the authors find that in municipalities with intensive coverage from local newspapers, local politicians do feel a stronger media pressure. However, when it comes to budgetary decisions, almost no observable effects of media pressure are found, either generally or in favourable political, economic or institutional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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