Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien. Information and Democracy: Public Policy in the News. Cambridge University Press. 2022. $99.99 (cloth). $34.99 (paper).

Abstract

This book is an empirical investigation of the role of media in democracy in the United States since 1980. It uses texts from 17 major newspapers, six broadcast news stations, and a social media outlet to identify content and sentiment regarding policy spending in five domains of defense, welfare, health, education, and environment. Its authors, Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, spent their careers identifying patterns in public preference formation in response to policies and policymaker representation of public preferences. Few opinion-policy researchers are unfamiliar with their thermostatic model. To date, this rich subfield lacks attention to what happens in-between public preferences (opinion) and policy outcomes. Enter this book. Media is a key theoretical mechanism transmitting policy to public preferences and vice versa, and this book ambitiously seeks to (1) ascertain the quantity and quality of US media content in these domains, and (2) test for a role of media in public preferences and policy, and feedback between. As chapter 1 points out, media research should help us understand democracy, specifically, whether media provides accurate information about government actions. Chapter 2 reviews previous work on the content and framing of policy in media but shows it does little to answer the question of whether there is enough accurate coverage to enable informed citizen decisions and voting to hold policymakers accountable. Their original thermostatic model included relative policy preferences (⁠R⁠) as a function of policy (⁠P⁠) and absolute preferences for policy (proxied by O⁠), where ΔP (change in policy) is the “signal” the public uses to change their preferences. The authors now add media (represented by M⁠) for a more complete picture (Equation 2.8, p. 33): ...