Abstract
Abstract How does media attention shape bureaucratic behavior? We answer this question using novel data from the Mexican federal government. We first develop a new indicator for periods of anomalously heightened media attention, based on 150,000 news articles pertaining to 22 Mexican government ministries and agencies, and qualitatively categorize their themes. We then evaluate government responsiveness using administrative data on roughly 500,000 requests for government information over a 10-year period, with their associated responses. A panel fixed-effects approach demonstrates effects of media attention on the volume of outgoing weekly responses, while a second approach finds effects on the “queue” of information requests already filed when anomalous media attention begins. Consistent across these empirical approaches, we find that media attention shapes bureaucratic behavior. Positive or neutral attention is associated with reduced responsiveness, while the effects of negative attention vary, with attention to government failures leading to increased responsiveness but attention to corruption leading to reduced responsiveness. These patterns are consistent with mechanisms of reputation management, disclosure threat, and workload burden, but inconsistent with mechanisms of credit claiming or blame avoidance.
Highlights
How does media attention shape bureaucratic behavior? When bureaucratic organizations are the focus of heightened media coverage, their responsiveness to the public may shift in different ways
When bureaucratic agencies experience media scrutiny, to what extent do they “clamp down” or “open up” in their responsiveness to citizens? We evaluate these questions in the context of 22 Mexican federal government agencies during the years 2005-2015
Qualitative interpretation further allows us to differentiate those anomalies associated with substantial negative media attention or controversy, and to separate them by themes including government failure and corruption
Summary
How does media attention shape bureaucratic behavior? When bureaucratic organizations are the focus of heightened media coverage, their responsiveness to the public may shift in different ways. Staving off such additional revelations — and the escalation of already-heightened attention into an even larger scandal — is of the highest priority for agency personnel (Gill and Hughes 2005; Berliner et al 2020), and we expect this supersedes organizations’ incentive to be forthcoming with information in order to improve reputations Such prioritization will be the case, as the lack of civil service protections in the Mexican bureaucracy means responding officials can be fired, making the career and partisan goals of their political principals of prime importance (Benton 2002). The contrast between these latter two mechanisms of bureaucratic behavior constitutes a refining of conventional wisdom that officials will uniformly “clamp down” on information in the face of negative attention as a blame avoidance mechanism predicts Instead, these mechanisms yield distinct expectations for different types of negative attention: Improved responsiveness due to attention to performance failures, and reduced responsiveness due to attention to corruption. When such negative media attention pertains to corruption, rather than to government failures, we may instead see the final mechanism of disclosure threat at work, as motivations to protect individual officials and political principals prevail
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