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There are vast literatures on the ways in which media content differs from reality, but we thus far have a rather weak sense for how exactly the representation of various topics in media differs from the distribution of information in the real world. Drawing on the gatekeeping literature, and utilizing a new automated content-analytic procedure, this article portrays both media content and “reality” as distributions of information. Measuring these allows us to identify the mechanism by which the distribution of information in the real world is transformed into the distribution of information in media; we can identify the gatekeeping function. Reporting on unemployment serves as a test case. Subsequent analyses focus on inflation and interest rates and on differences across Democratic and Republican presidencies. Results are discussed as they relate to negativity, to economic news, and to the broader study of distributions of information in political communication and politics.

Economic perceptions affect policy preferences and government support. It thus matters that these perceptions are driven by factors other than the economy, including media coverage. We nevertheless know little about how media reflect economic trends, and whether they influence (or are influenced by) public economic perceptions. This article explores the economy, media, and public opinion, focusing in particular on whether media coverage and the public react to changes in or levels of economic activity, and the past, present, or future economy. Analyses rely on content-analytic data drawn from 30,000 news stories over 30 years in the United States. Results indicate that coverage reflects change in the future economy, and that this both influences and is influenced by public evaluations. These patterns make more understandable the somewhat surprising finding of positive coverage and public assessments in the midst of the Great Recession. They also may help explain previous findings in political behavior.

There is a growing body of work suggesting that responses to positive and negative information are asymmetric—that negative information has a much greater impact on individuals' attitudes than does positive information. This paper explores these asymmetries in mass media responsiveness to positive and negative economic shifts and in public responsiveness to both the economy itself and economic news coverage. Using time-series analyses of U.K. media and public opinion, strong evidence is found of asymmetry. The dynamic is discussed as it applies to political communications and policymaking and more generally to public responsiveness in representative democracies.

Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.

Recent decades have been marked by increasingly divided partisan opinion in the US. This study investigates whether a similar trend might be occurring in Canada. It does so by examining redistributive preferences, using Canadian Election Studies data from every election since 1992. Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sorting that is comparable to that in the US. Over time, like-minded citizens have increasingly clustered into parties, with increasingly stark divisions between partisans. Aux États-Unis, les dernières décennies ont été marquées par des opinions partisanes de plus en plus divisées. Cette étude tente de savoir si une tendance similaire s’est développée au Canada. Pour ce faire, elle examine les préférences redistributives, utilisant les données de l’Étude électorale canadienne provenant de toutes les élections depuis 1992. Les résultats suggèrent que le Canada a connu une hausse de la sélection partisane qui est comparable à celle observée aux États-Unis. Au fil du temps, des citoyens aux vues similaires se sont regroupés dans des partis politiques, donnant lieu à des fossés grandissants entre les partisans.

A major theoretical justification for representative democracy is that it puts power in the hands of the people. Political scientists have tested whether this actually is true by assessing the degree to which policy reflects citizens’ preferences. Recent work finds that public policy is frequently responsive to the will of the people, but that there is significant variation across policy domains. There may be variation in responsiveness to different people as well. Indeed, recent work suggests that policy is responsive primarily, or even solely, to the richest Americans, at the expense of the middle class and poor.

The correspondence between public preferences and public policy is a critical rationale for representative democratic government. This view has been put forward in the theoretical literature on democracy and representation (e.g., Dahl 1971; Pitkin 1967; Birch 1971) and in “functional” theories of democratic politics (Easton 1965; Deutsch 1963), both of which emphasize the importance of popular control of policymaking institutions. Political science research also shows a good amount of correspondence between opinion and policy, though to varying degrees, across a range of policy domains and political institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere. This is of obvious significance.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2006 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, at the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties specialist group, Nottingham, England, and at the 2007 National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. We thank Vinod Menon for assistance with data collection and Kevin Arceneaux, Suzie DeBoef, Harold Clarke, Peter Enns, Mark Franklin, Martin Gilens, John Griffin, Will Jennings, Rich Joslyn, Benjamin Page, David Sanders, David Weakliem, John Zaller, and the anonymous reviewers for comments.

Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination countries? Existing work is divided. This paper examines the manner and extent to which increases in immigration are related to welfare state retrenchment, drawing on data from 1970 to 2007. The paper makes three contributions: (1) it explores the impact of changes in immigration on social welfare policy over both the short and medium term; (2) it examines the possibility that immigration matters for spending not just directly, but indirectly, through changes in demographics and/or the labour force; and (3) by disaggregating data on social expenditure into subdomains (including unemployment, pensions, and the like), it tests the impact of immigration on different elements of the welfare state. Results suggest that increased immigration is indeed associated with smaller increases in spending. The major pathway is through impact on female labour force participation. The policy domains most affected are ones subject to moral hazard, or at least to rhetoric about moral hazard.

Work exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy over time has largely been restricted to the United States. A wider application of this line of research can provide insights into how representation varies across political systems, however. This article takes a first step in this direction using a new body of data on public opinion and government spending in Britain. The results of analyses reveal that the British public appears to notice and respond (thermostatically) to changes in public spending in particular domains, perhaps even more so than in the United States. They also reveal that British policymakers represent these preferences in spending, though the magnitude and structure of this response is less pronounced and more general. The findings are suggestive about the structuring role of institutions.