Periodic Reporting for period 3 - BANK-LASH (Banks, Popular Backlash, and the Post-Crisis Politics of Financial Regulation)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-09-01 bis 2023-02-28
BANK-LASH attempts to draw together the connections between the media coverage of banks and banking, public opinion about financial regulation, and policy reforms in six countries since the 2008 financial crisis. The six countries are Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States The project poses three questions:
--How do attitudes towards financial regulation vary across countries?
--How does the framing and intensity of media coverage vary across countries?
--What are the political conditions under which countries adopt significant reforms of the regulations governing big banks in the post-crisis era?
These problems are important for society because there is a widespread perception that banks and senior bankers largely escaped accountability for the damage done to national economies during Great Recession, despite the prominent role of bank behavior in causing that crisis. The anti-bank thread runs through populist political reactions in all the countries studied, on both the political left and the political right. What the BANK-LASH project attempts to understand is what role the media plays in the process of opinion formation, as well as whether public opinion has led to big changes in the way banks are governed.
--How do attitudes towards financial regulation vary across countries?
--How does the framing and intensity of media coverage vary across countries?
--What are the political conditions under which countries adopt significant reforms of the regulations governing big banks in the post-crisis era?
These problems are important for society because there is a widespread perception that banks and senior bankers largely escaped accountability for the damage done to national economies during Great Recession, despite the prominent role of bank behavior in causing that crisis. The anti-bank thread runs through populist political reactions in all the countries studied, on both the political left and the political right. What the BANK-LASH project attempts to understand is what role the media plays in the process of opinion formation, as well as whether public opinion has led to big changes in the way banks are governed.
Our first work package (BANK-LASH 1) has assembled nationally representative survey samples in our six countries, using a three-wave survey design that includes two survey experimental waves. This is a large survey – we have over 27,500 respondents in the six countries in the first wave and almost 18,000 in the third wave. Successfully conducting this survey has already allowed us to achieve our first major objective, which is to assemble cross-nationally information on political attitudes to financial regulation. In ongoing work based on these results, we demonstrate that the public in all these countries has coherent attitudes on the regulation of finance. We are currently exploring the ways in which these attitudes interact with more well-known attitudes and socio-economic characteristics, and we are confident that these data will help scholars integrate political views towards financial regulation into the larger universe of political behavior.
Our second work package (BANK-LASH 2), aimed to provide a cross-nationally comparable representation of the salience and framing of banks and bankers in the countries included in the project, which are home to most of the globally systemically important banks in the world. We have put together a complete corpus of the articles dealing with banks and bankers in the major newspapers in these six countries. This has proven to be a challenging task, and one which was fully completed only relatively recently. Our purpose is to be able to understand the variations in how and how much national medias cover banks. We have already demonstrated through the survey work in BANK-LASH 1 that media coverage of scandals can have consequences for political attitudes towards financial regulation. But without knowing how much of a diet of scandal-coverage people in different countries are receiving, and when that coverage occurs, we cannot attempt to relate that coverage to political movements to alter the rules governing finance. We are continuing to fine-tune the analysis of the data on media coverage. There remains substantial work to do here, but the initial work is promising.
BANK-LASH 3, our third and final work package, is the least advanced so far, as it depends on a process of research being carried on by two doctoral students completing dissertations on the processes of policy reform in the countries studied in BANK-LASH. Robin Hsieh is working on a project dealing with the politics of structural reform in Switzerland, France and Germany, while Harry Begg is looking at the UK experience of regulating international and domestic banks post-crisis, with shadow comparisons to the American and Australian regulatory experiences. Both projects are on track and making good progress. As they advance, continued refinement of the text corpus in BANK-LASH 2 will increasingly be able to inform their examinations of the role of salience and media coverage during processes of successful and failed reform.
Our second work package (BANK-LASH 2), aimed to provide a cross-nationally comparable representation of the salience and framing of banks and bankers in the countries included in the project, which are home to most of the globally systemically important banks in the world. We have put together a complete corpus of the articles dealing with banks and bankers in the major newspapers in these six countries. This has proven to be a challenging task, and one which was fully completed only relatively recently. Our purpose is to be able to understand the variations in how and how much national medias cover banks. We have already demonstrated through the survey work in BANK-LASH 1 that media coverage of scandals can have consequences for political attitudes towards financial regulation. But without knowing how much of a diet of scandal-coverage people in different countries are receiving, and when that coverage occurs, we cannot attempt to relate that coverage to political movements to alter the rules governing finance. We are continuing to fine-tune the analysis of the data on media coverage. There remains substantial work to do here, but the initial work is promising.
BANK-LASH 3, our third and final work package, is the least advanced so far, as it depends on a process of research being carried on by two doctoral students completing dissertations on the processes of policy reform in the countries studied in BANK-LASH. Robin Hsieh is working on a project dealing with the politics of structural reform in Switzerland, France and Germany, while Harry Begg is looking at the UK experience of regulating international and domestic banks post-crisis, with shadow comparisons to the American and Australian regulatory experiences. Both projects are on track and making good progress. As they advance, continued refinement of the text corpus in BANK-LASH 2 will increasingly be able to inform their examinations of the role of salience and media coverage during processes of successful and failed reform.
The BANK-LASH 1 work package has demonstrated that, as predicted in our proposal, the politics of financial regulation is not derivative of either views on inequality or partisan politics. Our first work package has also deployed two experimental waves to examine the ways in which different types of media frames of stories about banks influence regulatory attitudes. We focus in particular – drawing in our work in the second work package, BANK-LASH 2 – on scandal frames. We find strong cross-national evidence that scandal frames increase preferences for regulation, though the effects of different types of scandal frames vary across countries. We find cross-country evidence that some scandal frames affect attitudes through the channel of emotion (in particular, through anger). These data were collected in 2020, and there is still much that we have to learn from them, as we work on several papers simultaneously that deal with various aspects of the study.
The BANK-LASH 2 work package has already shed light on how supervised vs. unsupervised techniques can inform questions of framing in the media, and there is much that we still have to learn from the data. We have analyzed this text using computational methods. In this the project has helped push forward the state of the art in the application of computational methods to the literature on framing in the media. In an article published in Political Communication in 2020, Tom Nicholls and Pepper Culpepper examine the performance of three unsupervised methods for identifying frames in text: k-means combined with natural language processing-feature identification, evolutionary factor analysis, and structural topic modelling. The article shows that even in a tightly targeted dataset, there remains some distance between the findings of these approaches and human coders; in a broad dataset, the approaches return what are clearly topics, not frames. The article also shows how elements of the different approaches can be usefully combined.
The overall integration of questions of policy responsiveness depends on the promising yet ongoing empirical work that is under way in the BANK-LASH 3 work package.
The BANK-LASH 2 work package has already shed light on how supervised vs. unsupervised techniques can inform questions of framing in the media, and there is much that we still have to learn from the data. We have analyzed this text using computational methods. In this the project has helped push forward the state of the art in the application of computational methods to the literature on framing in the media. In an article published in Political Communication in 2020, Tom Nicholls and Pepper Culpepper examine the performance of three unsupervised methods for identifying frames in text: k-means combined with natural language processing-feature identification, evolutionary factor analysis, and structural topic modelling. The article shows that even in a tightly targeted dataset, there remains some distance between the findings of these approaches and human coders; in a broad dataset, the approaches return what are clearly topics, not frames. The article also shows how elements of the different approaches can be usefully combined.
The overall integration of questions of policy responsiveness depends on the promising yet ongoing empirical work that is under way in the BANK-LASH 3 work package.