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‘Popularity Functions’ and the Role of the Media: A Pilot Study of the Popular Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Paul Mosley
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It is widely supposed that the level of popular support for governments depends on those governments' success in handling the economy. Some recent studies have attempted to test this idea by estimating the statistical relationship between the government's popularity in the opinion polls and various indicators of the state of the economy such as unemployment rates, inflation rates, growth rates and so on. A general finding of these studies is that popularity is significantly correlated with all these indicators of the standard of living. All of them, however, operate on the assumption that the voters behave as if they had perfect knowledge of the state of the economy as set out for example by the Government Statistical Service. Whether this assumption does, in fact, approximate to the truth will, however, depend in large part on how the popular media present economic trends and economic relationships to their public. If there are gaps and biases in the information which is presented to many voters, then those voters will be responding to a picture of the economy which may differ dramatically from the picture offered by publications such as Economic Trends and the government will be selling its policies in a highly imperfect market. The purpose of this paper is to mount a preliminary investigation into the picture of the economy which has been presented by one important medium of communication, namely mass-circulation newspapers. The aim is to show how firstly the scope and secondly the interpretation of the economic data presented by the popular press developed over the period 1960–80. The limitations of this method should be spelled out. We are not considering all the sources from which people derive information about the economy (personal communications, radio, television, newspapers), but only the last and possibly the most partisan of these. This Note offers, therefore, in no sense ‘the ordinary man in the street's perception of the economy’ but simply the picture of the economy which one influential medium of communication presented.

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Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 117 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 The most famous statement of this belief is Harold Wilson's assertion that ‘all political history shows that the standing of a government and its ability to hold the confidence of the electorate at a General Election depend upon the success of its economic policy’ (Financial Times, 8 03 1968)Google Scholar. See also Alt, J. and Chrystal, A., ‘Politico-economic Models of Fiscal Policy’ in Hibbs, D. and Fassbender, H., eds, Contemporary Political Economy (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1981)Google Scholar, Figure 3.1, who find that since 1979 a majority of the British public have seen economic issues as the most important problem facing the British economy.

2 For example: Goodhart, C. A. E. and Bhansali, R. J., ‘Political Economy’, Political Studies, XVIII (1970), 43–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mosley, Paul, ‘Images of the “Floating Voter” or, the “Political Business Cycle” Revisited’, Political Studies, XXVI (1978), 375–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frey, B. and Schneider, F., ‘A Politico-economic Model of the United Kingdom’, Economic Journal, LXXXVIII (1978), 243–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pissarides, C., ‘British Government Popularity and Economic Performance’, Economic Journal, XC (1980), 569–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 The position since 1960 has been that the Mirror's market has been fairly stable between four and five million, that the Express's sales have halved from a similar figure in 1960, and that the Sun, which was founded in 1964, has grown, particularly in the mid-seventies, to become the market leader. The circulation figures (in million copies sold) for 1960, 1970 and 1980 are: 1960, Express, 4·54; Mirror, 4·13; Mail, 2·08: 1970, Mirror, 4·92; Express, 3·73; Mail, 1·99; Sun, 1·25: 1980, Sun, 3·85; Mirror, 3·65; Express, 2·35; Mail, 1·94.

4 For a detailed discussion of this, see Odling-Smee, J. C., ‘The Rise in the UK Personal Savings Ratio’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, XXIX (1967), 281–7.Google Scholar

5 The basket of goods consisted of twenty-six different foods plus certain household goods such as soap powder. It had a value of £5.00 when the index was started in November 1970; the cost of the basket had risen to.£10.96 by May 1976. At this point the contents of the basket were increased to a value of £15.00 by the inclusion of various fresh fruits and vegetables, washing-up liquid and toothpaste. The value of this revised index was published every week for the next eighteen months and terminated in January 1978.

6 Only eighteen times between January 1970 and December 1979 (during which period more than three hundred and fifty weekly movements in the ‘Shopping Clock’ were published).

7 Bloom, H. and Price, H. D., ‘Voter Response to Short-run Economic Conditions’, American Political Science Review, LXIX (1975), 1240–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Mosley, , ‘Images of the “Floating Voter”’.Google Scholar

9 Alt and Chrystal, , in Hibbs, and Fassbender, , eds, Contemporary Political Economy, p. 191.Google Scholar

10 The reader may be aware of Behrend's survey findings of 1971 that a large proportion of people interviewed associated the word ‘inflation’ with ‘pumping up a tyre’ and that even then, with the rate of price rise near 10 per cent, a total of 37 per cent of respondents did not know what the word ‘inflation’ meant. See Behrend, H., ‘Research into Public Attitudes and the Attitudes of the Public to Inflation’, Managerial and Decision Economics, 11 (1981), 1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Unemployment and price inflation have been ‘detrended’ on the assumption that it is deviations from the norm for unemployment, not their actual levels, which will alarm the voter; we assume further that the norm is well represented by a seven-period moving average of the economic variable in question. This approach seems to be reasonably well-founded empirically; if government popularity responded to absolute levels of unemployment and inflation then the governing party's popularity would have steadily declined over time between 1953 and 1975 to reflect the secular increases that were taking place in inflation and unemployment. There has been no such movement in popularity. Figures in brackets beneath coefficients are Student's t-statistics. ** = significance at 1 per cent level, * = significance at 5 per cent.

Government's popularity lead = lead of goverment party over principal opposition party, as measured by Gallup Poll.

Unemployment detrended = difference between unemployment (in thousands) and its seven-period moving average, as measured by the Central Statistical Office and published in the Monthly Digest of Statistics.

Price inflation detrended = difference between annual rate of change of retail price index (all items) and its seven-period moving average, as measured by the CSO and published in the Monthly Digest of Statistics.

12 Figures in brackets beneath coefficients are Student's t-statistics; ** coefficients significant at 1 per cent level, * = coefficients significant at 5 per cent level.

Government's popularity lead = lead of government party over principal opposition party, as measured by Gallup Poll.

Unemployment detrended = difference between unemployment (in thousands) and its seven-period moving average, as reported by the Daily Mirror. If no value is reported in a given month, the last value to have been quoted is used in the regression.

Price inflation detrended = difference between year-on-year rate of inflation and its seven-period moving average, as reported in the Daily Mirror. (NB between 1970 and 1979 two measures of inflation are reported in the Daily Mirror: the official retail price index and the ‘Shopping Clock’, see p. 118 above. During this period the year-on-year movement in the ‘Shopping Clock’ is the indicator of price change used in the regression.)

13 Unemployment (which is insignificant over the entire period in this regression) is a case in point. It is widely suggested that the currently high level (winter 1982/3) of the government's popularity in spite of record unemployment is due to the fact that ‘people do not blame the government for unemployment’. But nobody knows whether this is so, or why.

14 The reader will recall that inflation scarcely figured in the papers under analysis here during the 1960s.

15 Dow, J. C. R., The Management of the British Economy 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

16 Daily Mirror, 15 01 1971.Google Scholar

17 Sun, 22 01 1972.Google Scholar

18 Leader comment, Daily Mirror, 20 04 1975, p. 2.Google Scholar

19 Including Samuelson, P., 8th edn, Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).Google Scholar

20 Sun, 2 04 1981, p. 2.Google Scholar

21 Daily Mirror, 11 03 1981, p. 2.Google Scholar

22 See footnote 1 above; compare the statement by Hibbs and Vassilatos that from 1970 on more than 70 per cent of the American voting public identified an economic issue as ‘the most important problem’ facing the country in every year (Hibbs, D. A. and Vassilatos, N., ‘Macroeconomic Performance and Mass Political Support in the United States and Great Britain’Google Scholar in Hibbs, and Fassbender, , eds, Contemporary Political Economy).Google Scholar

23 Galbraith, J. K., The New Industrial State (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1968).Google Scholar