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Agenda setting and policy punctuations in English urban policy: the role of the media and public opinion1 Peter John
School of Politics and Sociology, Malet St, London WC1E 7HX, UK, [email protected] Paper to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop, ‘Political Agenda Setting and the Media’, Uppsala, 13-18 April 2004 1. The project was funded by a Nuffield Foundation small grant. I thank the Foundation for its support. I also thank Rainbow Murray and Sachiko Muto for their help in coding the data.
1
Political scientists have commonly identified long periods of stability and self-
containment, which are interspersed with bursts of rapid change and ‘breakout’ from
established routines and monopolies. On the one hand, the political process can
become sticky, out of inertia or from rent-seeking by bureaucracies and interest
groups; on the other, after the build-up of reaction to problems or in response to new
ideas, there can be significant disruption of existing routines and rapid departure from
the usually limited circles of interaction and decision-making. It would seem that
both such processes are functional for societies and political systems – stability for
continuity; break out for necessary learning and the transformation. But both can be
dysfunctional because stability can be associated with conservatism, lack of learning,
ossification and unjustified concentrations of power whilst punctuations arise from
lack of planning and impulsive behaviour, which can lead to policy disasters.
This paper leaves aside such normative concerns, and seeks to identify the causal
pathways that lead from stability to punctuations and back again. In particular, it is
concerned with identifying the likely ‘transmission belts’ between some sorts of
social process and others, whereby the extent of attention to a particular agenda starts
to jump from one particular arena to another. In agenda setting, one of the crucial
areas for the consideration of agendas is the media, which processes issues, and which
may have a link to public opinion, on the one hand, and policy outputs on the other.
The paper seeks to explore the origins of shifts in the political agenda, through a
content analysis of media data in urban policy, and links to public opinion and
political events, setting out the beginnings of an analysis to explain policy outputs.
The main research questions are, first, identify the punctuations in media and public
opinion and, second, to seek what are the causes for those punctuations, whether they
2
derive from seismic changes in political behaviour rather than from ‘internal’ process
of agenda setting according to the interaction of ideas and organisational processes.
Punctuations and agenda setting
In the study of public policy, researchers have tended to emphasise the stability of
decision-making in a particular sector of activity. Traditionally incrementalism
emphasised the legacy of the past in current decisions, norms of behaviour, rules of
thumb and interest-group deadlock (Dahl and Lindblom 1953, Lindblom 1959,
Braybrook and Lindblom 1963, Davis et al 1966, Davis et al 1974, Lindblom 1975,
Lindblom 1979, Jones et al 1997). When analysing budgets researchers, such as
Wildavsky (1984) in the US and Rose in the UK (Rose and Davies 1993), emphasised
the importance of last year’s budget and the reality that programmes are typically
inherited from the past. The result is the sheer difficulty of launching new
programmes and carrying out massive expansions of existing ones. Researchers on
policy networks in the UK and US (Richardson and Jordan 1979, Marsh and Rhodes
1992) stress how the possibility of change was locked in by the functional dependence
of the executive on interest groups, the dominance of those groups of the agenda
because of their expertise and control over their members, and the relative secretive
nature of policy-making. More generally, UK researchers in the 1970s believed
governments had become overloaded and increasingly unable to make decisions as
their capacity decreased and their dependence on producer groups increased (King
1980, Birch 1984). In the 1980s and 1990s, US commentators sought to test the idea
that the US system was similarly apparently unable to process decisions because of
3
institutional fragmentation, a factor that was exacerbated by partisanship instability
and personalisation, which led to the weak party control and differential voting
patterns depending on the institution (Mayhew 1991).
Stability has never been the exclusive characteristic of policy-making. As has been
noted by Baumgartner and Jones, incrementalists did examine breaks from periods of
stability (Davis et al 1996: 351). In general, tests of gridlock upheld Mayhew’s null
findings (Binder 1999). In British politics, there has been a tradition of observing
deviations from trend owing to oscillation of two- party politics (Finer 1975), the
simple version of which was the object of criticism by Rose (1980). More generally,
countries have been subjected to periods of much studied partisan-introduced sets of
policy changes, such 1945-51 in the UK (Hennessy 1992). The conventional view of
policy-making as characterised party consensus on the key issues – Butskellism – has
been challenged by more detailed political histories (e.g. Glennerster 2000). Some
accounts of British politics stress the tendency to policy lurches, leading to disasters,
which derive from aspects of the British governing system – the ease of law-making,
centralisation, the structure of decision-making in cabinet, ministerial hyper-activism,
and civil service culture (Dunleavy 1995, Gray 1998).
Public policy scholars in the 1990s became much more interested in analysing the
impacts sudden bursts of change, such as Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s account of the
role of external shocks, which can shift the set of governing coalitions (Sabatier and
Jenkins-Smith 1993, Sabatier 1999); Kingdon’s metaphor of policy windows, where
entrepreneurs were capable of seizing a particular policy idea and pushing it forward
if the streams come together (Kingdon 1984); and finally Baumgartner and Jones’s
4
model of punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner and Jones 1991, 1993; Jones 1994,
2001; Jones et al 1998; True et al 1999; True 2000; Baumgartner and Jones 2002;
Jones et al 2003 Policy Agendas Project, University of Washington,
http://depts.washington.edu/ampol/navResearch/agendasproject.shtml), whereby long
periods of stability and policy monopolies could give way to punctuations and then a
return to stability once more. Jones, in particular, has directed particular attention to
the tendency for agendas to expand in a non-linear fashion, whereby issues have a
tendency to grab policy-makers’ attention precisely because most decision-makers are
boundedly rational. They move from one issue to another because of the tendency for
the most prominent issue to dwarf the rest. Agendas can gather momentum rapidly
because of the way in which interested parties, such as those in the media, attach
themselves to a new issue, which means that, once agendas have enough impetus to
change, they ‘expand’ in a non-linear fashion, moving rapidly from stasis to
innovation, what Baumgartner and Jones call the process of ‘positive feedback' (1993:
125). The phenomenon of serial processing of information by decision-makers, which
in times of stability serves to prevent policy change, also ensures they increasingly
focus on new issues to the exclusion of others once the agenda shifts. The result is
that ‘some problems gain disproportionate attention from many policy venues’
(Baumgartner and Jones 1993: 250). More policy-makers become involved because
‘the diffuse jurisdictional boundaries that separate the various overlapping institutions
of government can allow many governmental actors to become involved in a new
policy area’ (True et al 1999: 99). In Jones and Baumgartner’s language, the ‘issue
monopolies’ that govern policy sectors, like urban policy or nuclear power, break
down and become re-established later, but at a new equilibrium point, where a new
constellation of interest groups and institutional rules cement a set of policy proposals
5
into place until the next punctuation. Under this model, ‘punctuations are a regular
and important feature of US budget making and US policymaking’ (True et at al,
1999: 111).
The origins of punctuations
The Baumgartner and Jones’s approach has generated a number of tests of policy
changes through committee hearings (Baumgartner and Jones, 1991: 1062-3; 1993:
193-215, Jones et al 1993; Talbert et al 1995; Wilkerson et al 2002; Feeley 2002),
media outputs (Baumgartner and Jones 1993: 103-125), public opinion records
(Baumgartner and Jones 1991, 1993), public regulations, such as laws (Baumgartner
and Jones 1991: 1058), budgets (Jones et al 1997, 1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2003,
Mortensen 2001, Feeley 2002, Robinson 2004) and stock market changes (Jones and
Sulkin 2003). It seems that punctuations do exist in policy outputs and in the media,
and also in other arenas (Jones et al 2003).
There has been less attention to the reason for punctuations and what they indicate for
the veracity of the democratic process, which is the focus of this paper. Work so far
identities several sources of punctuations. The first is the familiar aforementioned
one of partisan change, whereby policy outputs are shaped by the ideological
positions of parties that have a bundle of preferences about the direction of
government decision-making, which may turn into spending or other outputs. With a
change in government or the composition of a coalition comes a new set of
preferences. Some elections may be particularly strong examples of partisan change
6
if they come from a sea-change in political debate. There are some tests of change of
partisanship for public spending (Hofferbert and Budge 1992). Along with the
criticism of the no change hypothesis is a stream of work that demonstrates that party
politics matters for the output of nations (Castles 1982, Garrett 1998, Swank 2002),
even in the face of apparently homogenising forces of economic competition, and by
implication changes in partisanship, such as for budgets. Such considerations appear
in Jones et al’s (1998) work on budgets where they associate changes in budgets with
changes in partisanship. Similarly, Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) identify change
in the advocacy coalitions with the Reagan presidency, for example; and Kingdon
looks at political changes as a cause for the emergency of policy windows.
However, it would be fair to say that partisanship does not figure very highly in recent
accounts of agenda and policy change. In terms of democratic theory, here we have a
potentially non-elite cause of punctuation, closer to the democratic ideal, whereby
new issues affect voting behaviour that in turn affect party positions. Here the debate
links to the now solid stream of work that shows how public opinion affect the policy
position and outputs of governments (e.g. Page and Shapiro 1983, Wlezien 1996,
2004), though qualified by venue (Soroka and Lim 2003, Soroka and Wlezien 2004a,
2004b). Of course, such partisan changes may have come about through changes in
attention in the media and shifts in the elites’ stances, which in turn affect public
opinion and voting behaviour, directions of influence something that more
sophisticated accounts of causation can adjudicate upon (see Edwards and Wood
1999, Soroka 2002a).
The second cause of punctuations is the sudden shocks mentioned earlier, which are
usually large socio-political events, such as the oil embargo of the 1970s, which
7
shatter policy routines and force onto the agenda new issues and ideas by their sheer
magnitude. Massive problems need to be solved, and newly powerful groups needs to
be assuaged or brought into the policy process. These events are probably more
distant from democratic process than public opinion and partisan change because the
elite has to respond to environment changes rather than to a new will; but it is possible
that public opinion and partisan orientation will move in the same direction as the
leaders respond to change. Moreover, external change may be closely linked to the
behaviour of excluded groups that seek to seize the agenda.
The third source of radical agenda and policy change is through the emergence of new
ideas, which can suddenly ‘hit’ a political system. Here policy entrepreneurs may be
able to sell an idea to leaders and publics, and once it catches on it can be
unstoppable. Such a concept also appears to a limited extent in Sabatier’s model of
policy change, though he argues that policy-makers and agenda-setters are
‘hardwired’ into their core beliefs. Here we have the emergence of new ideas in
policy, which may arise from new research or from transfer of practices across
nations. It also links to the idea that propagators may gain the attention of executives,
which then seek to influence the media and public opinion, depending on the policy
issue (Hill 1998). The alternative is where policy entrepreneurs sell the idea to the
media, where it takes hold and in turn influences the policy agenda, on the one hand,
and public opinion, on the other. Here the idea is that media acts as a gatekeeper
between mass public and executive leaders, which may reflect the selective pressure
of particular interest-group entrepreneurs (Baumgartner and Jones 1993: 106). The
direction of causation from the media to public opinion and/or executive priorities is
central to much agenda setting research (e.g. Cobb and Elder 1971, 1970, Soroka
8
2002a), with some research focusing on the positive and significant influence of the
media on public opinion on the one hand (McCombs and Shaw 1972, Winter and Eyal
1981, Cook et al 1983, Soroka 2002) and on policy adoptions on the other (Carpenter
2002).
These perspectives give an indication of the origins of radical agenda and policy
change. As the discussion indicates, they are not entirely exclusive in that they may
run together, such as external events and partisan change. Nonetheless, they suggest
certain hypotheses: the punctuations will be associated with partisan changes and a
prior shift in public opinion; second that agenda change will be associated with large
events such as rises in urban political violence; third that debates and changes will
drive punctuations, so that the media is seen to influence the policy debate.
Urban policy change
Urban policy concerns targeted government programmes that aim to remedy acute
spatially concentrated patterns of unemployment, urban decay, and associated social
problems, often in the core of urban areas. One of the consequences of economic
growth is a tendency for urban growth and decay to have a spatial pattern and
dynamic, particularly as growth occurs in certain locales, even within a metropolis,
and for areas to lose their economic advantage through competition with other areas
and from technological change. Underlying this process are the powerful forces that
create inequality, such as population movements, and the way in which aspects of
disadvantage tend to reinforce each other. On top of that is the tendency for minority
9
groups to live in these deprived areas where the lack of access to jobs is compounded
by discrimination.
In the west, governments at first believed that they only needed to intervene in the
macro-economy and that the market would sort out these inequalities. But the
persistence of pockets of poverty and unemployment in the 1960s, at a time of rising
prosperity, and the confidence of social science to develop techniques to improve
society, led governments, such as those in the US and in the UK, to intervene more
selectively. Moreover, there have been bursts of activism and reform that have
reflected many political pressures, as well as tendency to replace programme because
of frustration that many do not appear to work (see Robson 1994). Urban policies
typically suffer from successful bursts of activism, which both reflect ministerial
activism and distinct waves of intervention that surrounded the creation of urban
policy: the activism of the Labour governments in the 1970s, then targeted initiatives
to revive urban markets by the Conservatives first in the early 1980s associated with
the urban development corporations, which rapidly expanded expenditure up the mid
1980s and then the Action for Cities set of initiatives that followed the 1987 election,
and then the reform of urban policy through the Single Regeneration Budget in 1993,
with a lessening of attention to urban issues after that date. This makes the key dates
as 1968, the creation of the Urban Programme; the reform of the urban polices from
1975 that led to the 1977 White Paper; the creation of new targeted regeneration
policies by the Thatcher governments in 1982-5; and then in a further period of
reform in 1987-89, and then in 1993.
10
It is plausible to apply the three models to explore these policy initiatives. In urban
policy, although there is a high degree of partisan agreement on matters such as the
need for government to remedy market failure, political parties can disagree about the
causes of inner city deprivation, such as the extent to which new forms of regulation
are needed or whether substantial transfers of funds are the key, as in the traditional
social-democratic version of the operation and effects of markets. Partisan change
may have been associated with the creation of the urban policy in 1968, with the
activities of a Labour government keen to forge new sets of voting patterns.
Similarly, urban policy fashion in the 1980s followed the election of a Conservative
government that wanted to impose a business agenda on deprived areas.
Radical changes may have occurred to promote these changes. A core idea in the
neo-pluralist perspective is that inequalities of political and economic power may
addressed by more extreme forms of political behaviour that react to those
inequalities. What radical political action can achieve is issue expansion in the classic
agenda-setting mode, by causing an issue to rise onto the agenda. We may think of
riots as collective outbreaks of violence, with an element of spontaneity, which
usually affect inner cities and are often associated with the poor and excluded, and
which usually challenge elites either to respond in terms of law and order spending or
improved welfare. In neo-pluralists terms riots represent a form of political
communication from the poor to the governed, where they operate as a compensation
for the failure of traditional mechanisms of democracy (Lipsky 1970). They can
punctuate the political agenda and compensate for the operation of traditional biases
in favour of established interests (Cobb and Elder 1971: 913). Then there is the
interaction of political violence with the stances and ideological positions of political
11
parties’ beliefs, which may affect the extent to which a political party may react to
these events, as well as reactions from the media (Button 1978). Riots can stimulate
policy change by causing issues such as urban poverty, the needs of the ethnic
populations, and the conditions of the inner cities to be considered by policy-makers
who fear repeated acts of violence and react to dramatic media commentary. In 1960s
USA and 1980s UK, black violence was linked to a host of grievances, such as poor
housing and unemployment, which provoked a social policy response. Thus the
1960s riots stimulated policy-makers in riot states and cities to allocate federal aid
programmes, in particular the Aids to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to
inner city populations (Piven and Cloward 1972: 196-198, 240-245, Hicks and Swank
1983, Fording 1997, 2001), and a range of other programmes (Button 1978).
Piven and Cloward place their argument in a more complex intersection of political
violence and public policies whereby the social programmes of the 1960s expressed in
part a political project to integrate the disruptive poor populations. Overall they adopt
a social control rather than a political communication perspective, but gains are still
there to be had. Their approach is summed up by the much-quoted phrase: ‘a placid
poor get nothing; but a turbulent poor sometimes gets something’ (Piven and Cloward
1972: 338). Such changes may only last a short period of time. A social control
perspective would suggest that that state actors respond to the demands created by
political violence, in which case the welfare spending should return to trend (Fording
2001: 115-116).
In England, the 1960s civil disturbances, the 1970s race riots, the 1980s riots, and the
1985 riots do seem quite close to the policy changes described earlier. In particular,
12
the riots of the early 1980s triggered extensive public discussion and official
deliberation, such as the Scarman report of 1981. There was ministerial interest on
the part of Michael Heseltine, who visited Merseyside, activities which led to the
creation and extension or the urban development corporations.
The third set of changes may have been promoted by extensive discussion of policy
alternatives, which is particularly common in urban policies subject as it is to changes
in fashion and experimentation. Policy transfer from the US was particularly apparent
in the 1960s (Batley and Edwards 1978) and also in the 1980s, with Urban
Development Corporations (UDCs) and Enterprise Zones - all copied from the North
American experience. In this case we would expect punctuations in policy attention
to be ahead of media attention to these issues. This may be entirely plausible as urban
policy is particular subject to ministerial entrepreneurship – the case of Michael
Heseltine has already been mentioned, but there are numerous other ministers who
have shown an interest. Here we expect policy change to precede media and public
opinion change
Data collection
The research identifies policy and agenda change in urban policy from 1964-2003,
dates chosen to encompass the whole of the Urban Programme, through a coding of
media attention, public opinion and policy outputs. The project is not finished so the
full results cannot be presented here, in particular the budget data has not been
completed, but some of the media and public opinion data is available.
13
The media’s attention data is drawn from two sources: Lexis-Nexis and the The
Times Digital Archive. The former is an electronic newspaper record of stories
(Financial Times from 1982, The Times since 1985; other newspapers from later
dates), which can be listed according to pre-chosen selection terms. The latter records
the incidence of The Times extended back from 1985 to way before the cut-off period
of 1966. The analysis presented here is about The Times. The coders examined
media attention of the term ‘inner city’ and ‘riot(s)’. The coders had to develop a
code frame to determine when articles should be included and excluded, which
involved developing criteria to exclude articles that were not within English urban
policy on the former term, for example articles on European urban policy and terms
for riot that were for irrelevant topics, such as gardening (e.g. ‘riot of colour’). More
troublesome were occasions of riots were not linked to the urban context, such as
football and prison riots, which could conceivable be linked to urban problems, say in
deprived areas, but in the end we excluded them. It should be noted that the term riot
indicates both the occurrence of riots and media attention. For this piece, it is not
important where the riot occurs, though subsequent research will test the hypothesis
that riot cities get more resources, which is the central thrust of the test of the Piven
and Cloward thesis.
Public opinion data was drawn from Gallup polls (King and Wybrow 2001: 262-
273). Soroka and Wlezien (2004a, 2004b) have used the repeated annual question,
‘Do you think that the government is spending too much, too little or about the right
amount on …’, with respect to policy areas. But there was no question on an urban
policy issue, so we used ‘What would you say is the most urgent problem facing the
14
country at the present time?’, with a choice of responses. The basket of responses
started in 1966, changed in 1978, and again in 1989, to reflect the changing character
of public issues. The core list remained unchanged. The project coded the
percentage of respondents indicating an issue was the most urgent problem.
The policy outputs are key events, such as pieces of legislation and new programmes,
and annual budgets for urban policy. There is no central record of urban policy
budget totals, so the painstaking process collecting them from the parliamentary
estimates is still in train to be ready for a later version of this paper.
15
Media attention
The media’s attention to urban policy issues can be captured by The Times’s
representation of the term ‘inner city’ which is synonymous with urban policy
matters. Figure 1 shows the monthly hits from 1966.
Figure 1: monthly hits of ‘inner city’ for the Times 1966-95
Date
Jul 1994
Jan 1993
Jul 1991
Jan 1990
Jul 1988
Jan 1987
Jul 1985
Jan 1984
Jul 1982
Jan 1981
Jul 1979
Jan 1978
Jul 1976
Jan 1975
Jul 1973
Jan 1972
Jul 1970
Jan 1969
Jul 1967
Jan 1966
Incl
uded
arti
cles
for i
nner
city
in th
e Ti
mes
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
16
What this graph shows is the changes in the patterns of interest over time, with almost
no interest in the term in mid to late 1960s, but a gradual increase since that time, with
apparent punctuations around 1975, and then 1981, and then 1987. These were times
of important policy changes, with 1975 being the time of the 1975 policy change, and
1987, so it is not clear whether the media follows rather than creates the policy
interest. Nonetheless, the data seem punctuated at these points, and with a permanent
increase in interest from 1985. In fact the data also seem to correspond with the
political violence of these times with the increase in activity around 1981-1982, which
then falls back, but with a much larger increase around January 1984 which then
peaks and remains at a much higher level than in the previous period, suggesting a
permanent increase in media attention to urban policy issues. The break point also is
earlier than the transfer from the Times Digital Archive and Lexis-Nexis, just to
ensure that it is not the transfer between online systems that might explain the break
in the data.
Is the data punctuated or not? We can use some of the tests suggested by Jones et al
(2003) to find out (also see True 1999). Jones suggests that punctuations may be
found by mapping the distributions of per cent changes around the median point. If
the distribution is normal, then the decision-making structure is incremental,
characterised by a random distribution of changes; if there is punctuations, then it
should be leptokurtic – that is have many distributions close to the median point, with
also an above average at extreme points to mark the punctuations. Figure 2 plots the
distribution of bands of 5 per cent changes (e.g. –5=-5 to –10 per cent changes, 0 = 0
to –5 percent, 5=0 to 5 per cent, etc), which looks non-normal from visual inspection,
17
with a gradual growth in the reporting of the term during the period as indicated by
the positive mean change.
Figure 2: plots of 5 per cent change bands of changes of ‘inner city’ as reported
in The Times
bands of 5 per cent changes in inner city - The Times
800.0750.0
700.0650.0
600.0550.0
500.0450.0
400.0350.0
300.0250.0
200.0150.0
100.050.0
0.0-50.0-100.0
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Std. Dev = 92.26 Mean = 18.1
N = 267.00
Tests show the distribution is not normal. The Shapiro-Wilk statistic is .735 which
has a probability of zero; so too the Kolmogorov-Smirnov is .135 and also has a
probability of zero. The distribution has a high kurtosis of 22.1 (se=.297). One of
the problems with this kind of measure is that it is not good as establishing a step
change, which is our intuitive idea of a punctuation. Instead, following Jones et al
18
1998, we can use dummy variables to represent the changes. In table 1 we report an
ARIMA (2,0,1) to estimate the effects of a series of dummy variables that seek to
capture the possible punctuations, so which derive from either the executive, partisan
impacts or have been generated by external shocks, though of course it is hard to
distinguish between these factors. It should be noted that, though it appears that the
inner city terms gradually trends upwards, a Dicky-Fuller test shows we can reject the
hypothesis that there is a unit root in this series (p=00).
The first test is whether there is a punctuation before and after the 1977 White Paper,
A Policy for the Inner Cities, which was the culmination of a process that started in
June of 1975 (Atkinson and Moon 1994: 65-6). This represented a major shift in
government policy, and did much to promote the term inner city in public discourse,
and it came from a major rethink about government policy, described by Atkinson and
Moon (1994: 64-86) as a ‘watershed’, which appears strongly in this model. The
second model tests the riots thesis, that July 1981 is the key date. The third tests
whether the 1987 with the election of a third term Conservative Government, keen to
promote a new approach to the inner cities in its Action for Cities document. This
was famously captured with pictures of the prime minister walking across an urban
wasteland in a photo-shoot just after the General Election. As with the others, model
3 appears as a plausible transfer point, but it also provides the most lift in attention
compared to the other dummy variables. The fourth tests for the partisanship with
Labour central government coded as 1 and Conservative as 0, with the counter
intuitive result that it is Conservative governments that lift attention to ‘inner city’.
Thus all four point s appear as punctuations, and not all can be used in the model
19
because of multicollinearity. So the next stage is to explore more how to model the
relevant punctuations.
20
Table 1: alternative specification of punctuations in the ‘inner city’ time series
Semi-robust standard errors in parentheses
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 1975 18.35* - - -
(3.69) Riot 81 - 26.26* - - (6.98) 1987 - - 30.45* - (10.66) Party - - - -9.32* (4.43) AR(2) .55* .512* .550* .620* (.142) (.163) (.151) (.139) MA(1) .69* .665* .625* .737* (.151) (.168) (.161) (.147) Constant 3.07 3.21 7.427 18.56 (2.36) (2.20) (2.51) (2.90) Log pseudo- likelihood -1295.9 -1281.0 -1280.8 -1300.5
N 346 346 346 346
The second source of media data is the reporting of riot itself in The Times during this
period (the coders have only reached a certain point) as shown in Figure 3.
21
Figure 3: Occurrence of riot in The Times
Date
Jul 1994
Jan 1993
Jul 1991
Jan 1990
Jul 1988
Jan 1987
Jul 1985
Jan 1984
Jul 1982
Jan 1981
Jul 1979
Jan 1978
Jul 1976
Jan 1975
Jul 1973
Jan 1972
Jul 1970
Jan 1969
Jul 1967
Jan 1966
Incl
uded
arti
cles
for r
iot
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
The riot figure shows the attention to riots in the newspapers, which shows an
extensive area of attention over the period, with a step change in 1978, and a massive
attention increase in 1980 (the first set of riots in Brisol, the precursor to the more
violent episode in Brixton the following year), and then in 1981, with another rise in
interest in 1985. The coders have not got beyond January 1987, but it looks like
there is another increase in interest. Looking at the series as a whole, it looks like
there is a break in the series before and after 1981, suggesting that the 1981 riots may
have punctuated the agenda of British politics.
22
A plausible hypothesis is that attention to riot generates attention to inner city. Table
2 tests this hypothesis.
Table 2: different specifications of the attention to inner city through media
attention to riot in The Times
Model 1 Model 2
Riot .6423* - (.0750) Riot(t-1) - .118 (.255) AR(2) .501* .523* (.129) (.116) MA(1) .611* .482* (.161) (.324) Constant 5.66 7.88* (1.17) (1.912) Log pseudo- -785.4 -874.4 Likelihood N 252 252
There appears to be a strong link from current reporting of riot to inner city, but not
lagged effect, and this finding also applies to longer lag specification of riot. There
does not appear evidence that riot reporting feeds in a time-lagged sense into
reporting of inner city. But data the display a high degree of volatility at one end of
the series but not at the other. Tests on an OLS regression of both model 1 and
model 2 suggest autoregressive conditional heteroscedascity (p=0.00 and .0003
respectively). This cautions for careful treatment in time-series models, such as the
application of the ARCH family of models. Indeed a GARCH (1,1) specification
shows the both the lagged and the simultaneous terms to be significant in both cases
(see output in the appendix).
23
Public Opinion
Public opinion exists for a number of relevant dimensions for urban policy. Housing
is one obvious dimension, which is represented in the figure 2.
Figure 3: housing as the most urgent problem.
Date
Jan 1985
Jan 1984
Jan 1983
Jan 1982
Jan 1981
Jan 1980
Jan 1979
Jan 1978
Jan 1977
Jan 1976
Jan 1975
Jan 1974
Jan 1973
Jan 1972
Jan 1971
Jan 1970
Jan 1969
Jan 1968
Jan 1967
Jan 1966
Hou
sing
as
mos
t urg
ent p
robl
em
20
10
0
It seems that housing started being an important problem but then dropped to a few
percentage points – in any case it is hard to imagine the population thinking that
housing should be that important, though it is interesting to think why the general
public became so interested in it in the early 1970s.
24
Another obvious topic is unemployment, which has affected the inner cities more than
elsewhere. The data is shown in figure 4, which shows its gradual rise an issue as
unemployment increased in the 1980s. The dip may be connected to the riots in 1981
as the public may have shifted its attention.
Figure 4: unemployment as the most urgent problem.
Date
Jan 1985
Jan 1984
Jan 1983
Jan 1982
Jan 1981
Jan 1980
Jan 1979
Jan 1978
Jan 1977
Jan 1976
Jan 1975
Jan 1974
Jan 1973
Jan 1972
Jan 1971
Jan 1970
Jan 1969
Jan 1968
Jan 1967
Jan 1966
Une
mpl
oym
ent a
s m
ost u
rgen
t pro
blem
100
80
60
40
20
0
Turning to law and order, we can see this as an alternative response to political
violence as well as an urban policy, and this is shown in figure 5.
25
Figure 5: law and order the most urgent problem
Date
Jan 1985
Jan 1984
Jan 1983
Jan 1982
Jan 1981
Jan 1980
Jan 1979
Jan 1978
Jan 1977
Jan 1976
Jan 1975
Jan 1974
Jan 1973
Jan 1972
Jan 1971
Jan 1970
Jan 1969
Jan 1968
Jan 1967
Jan 1966
Law
and
ord
er a
s m
ost u
rgen
t pro
blem
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Law and order shows bursts of activity in the late 1970s, with a larger burst in 1981,
again which may be linked to the riots, which dies away again later on.
The other surprise is the extent to which public attention to immigration does not
grow as the most important problem during our period, which is shown in figure 6.
Here the figures show a rise in public attention at the beginning of the 1970s, that then
dies away, to be followed by a rise in concern over the 1980s.
26
Figure 6: immigration the most urgent problem
:
Date
Jan 1985
Jan 1984
Jan 1983
Jan 1982
Jan 1981
Jan 1980
Jan 1979
Jan 1978
Jan 1977
Jan 1976
Jan 1975
Jan 1974
Jan 1973
Jan 1972
Jan 1971
Jan 1970
Jan 1969
Jan 1968
Jan 1967
Jan 1966
Imm
igra
tion
as m
ost u
rgen
t pro
blem
30
20
10
0
Is this data macropunctuated? The answer to that question is that it is partially.
Unemployment clearly is, with a massive increase in the early 1980s, with no
subsidence. Housing shows a move from high to low importance. Law and order
is, but rather less so, along with immigration.
It is useful to see whether a major shift in attention to the inner cities in the media is
linked to public opinion. Here we are uncertain about the direction of causality so a
vector autoregression model (VAR) model is appropriate where a lag of two is
27
specified. The results are shown in table 3, which shows that public opinion affects
media coverage and not vice versa, a finding that is consistent with the literature on
media effects. Analysis of the opinion variables ‘law and order’ and ‘immigration’
do not show a relationship, indicating the public perceptions of unemployment is the
main driver of public opinion and that the media interest does not drive public
attention either.
Table 3: a VAR model of ‘inner city’ and opinion on unemployment (2 lags) Dependent Independent ‘Inner City’ ‘Inner City’→ .505* (.075) Unemployment→ .101* (.027)
Constant 1.864 (1.20) Unemployment ‘Inner city’ -.002 (.069) Unemployment→ .971* (.025) Constant 1.762 (1.115) N=163, r-sq for ‘inner city’=.38, for unemployment=.92
28
Final models
To find out the possible origins of punctuations, it is possible to put together the
variables in a series of final models. We first assume that the changes in public
concern about unemployment, lagged by one month, affect changes in media
attention. Then we seek to add a series of dummy variables to see if there is
additional explanatory power from some of the dummy variables.
Table 4: final models predicting ‘inner city’
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Unemploymentt-1 .136* -.014 .221* .173* (.055) (.198) (.048) (.053) 1975 5.73* - - 4.36* (1.843) (1.70) Riot81 - 18.03 - - (27.01) Party - - 4.80* 3.30* (1.81) (1.65) AR(2) .384* .537* .383* .372* (.117) (.317) (.119) (.119) MA(1) .358* .418 .358* .352* (.115) (.207) (.114) (.114) Constant .981 4.81 .238 -.554 (.966) (1.80) (1.25) (1.13) Log pseudo-likelihood -607.1 -603.0 -607.3 -606.5 N 173 173 173 173
Model 1 shows that the 1975 dummy still retains its power when controlling for
public interest; model 2 does not work at all largely because of high collinearity
between lagged media attention to unemployment and the riot dummy variable. From
29
this analysis, it is not possible to adjudicate whether it is riots or media concern with
unemployment that is the factor affecting media attention to ‘inner city’, though in a
separate regression with each one as a separate independent variable, riot has a higher
t-value (3.76) than public opinion (3.54). We could not model the 1987 dummy
because the public opinion data only goes up to 1987 at this stage of data collection.
Model 3 shows party to have the hypothesised sign, with Labour promoting more
attention to inner city, which shows its impact when controlling for public opinion.
Model 4 integrates the most plausible independent terms into a satisfactory model of
public opinion, the 1975 dummy and party control.
Conclusions
This paper is preliminary because of the unfinished state of data collection, so it is not
possible to make the links to final policy outputs. There are also gaps in cases for
public opinion, which means that different parts of the analysis have different
numbers of cases. There are also modelling issues to resolve about the exact form of
time regression analysis. Nonetheless, the analysis has made some progress in
seeking to uncover the origins of punctuations through exploring the attention of the
media to a critical policy issue of the ‘inner city’. We show that such attention is
punctuated, just as Baumgartner and Jones predict. Such is the nature of public
issues. We also show that certain dates are important in shifting media attention. The
1975 policy change appears to have shifted public interest. At first it seemed that the
riots also shifted public interest as Piven and Cloward hypothesised. But in fact
lagged media attention to riots does not predict media attention; nor does a dummy
30
variable reflecting the key riot date affect it either once the control of public opinion
on unemployment had been controlled for. What predicts media attention is lagged
attention in public opinion, as well as policy initiation as indicated by the 1975 policy
change. Finally, we note that parties have an impact as the traditional literature
indicates.
Much remains for future research. Public spending data will allow the adjudication
between outputs, the media and public attention. More data points will become
available as the coders progress. Fuller VAR models should be able to capture the
causal effects in a fuller way that has been achieved in the current paper. Finally, it
will be possible to account for the punctuations in a more nuanced way through
modelling step and pulse changes as in a dynamic time-series model.
31
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Appendix: GARCH estimations of key models
Table 2: attention to inner city through media attention to riot in The Times
OPG standard errors in parentheses Model 1 Model 2
Riot .393* - (.012) Riot(t-1) - .099* (.011) Constant .427 1.168 (.775) (.465) AR(2) .868* .799* (.055) (.033) MA(1) .950* .920* (.022) (.015) ARCH (1) .915* 2.17* (.137) (.199) GARCH (1) .549* .321* (.030) (.030) Constant .021 .011 (.013) (.031) Log - Likelihood -624.5 -636.4 N 240 239
39
Table 4: final model predicting ‘inner city’
OPG standard errors in parentheses Model 4 Unemploymentt-1 .081*
(.030) 1975 -2.02 (1.93) Party 5.98* (1.59) Constant .839 (1.072) AR(2) .546* (.046) MA(1) .830* (.027) ARCH(1) 3.11* (.408) GARCH(1) .029* (.024) Constant 4.76
(1.99) Log likelihood = -576.3336 N 173
40