Does media content influence legislators? The case of tech industry regulation in the UK
Abstract
In this article, we study whether media content influences legislators.
We use the emergence of big tech companies and their regulation as a case study. We collect a large corpus of speeches about the tech industry delivered in the British Parliament over the past twenty years, as well as articles about tech giants published in five major British newspapers. Using NLP, we construct monthly time series tracing changes in media content and political discourse on the regulation of digital companies.
Using Granger-causality tests, we test whether media content has an independent predictive impact on politicians. We interpret these findings with a structural model in which media provide valuable information to both voters and politicians: they inform voters about where the politicians stand on a number of issues, and they inform politicians about voters’ preferences on these same issues.
About the speaker
Karine Van der Straeten is a senior researcher at the CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research), a member of the Toulouse School of Economics and of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Her research interests include Political Economy, Experimental Economics and Formal Political Science. Recent topics include: institutions and corruption, citizen information and the quality of public decision making, public opinion measurement, inequality and redistribution. She served as associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science and Mathematical Social Sciences, and on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review. She held positions at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Paris School of Economics (France), before joining the Toulouse School of Economics in 2008.
Language
English
This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.
Supported by the Fond National de la Recherche
Luxembourg (19441346)