It Takes Three: How Mass Media Coverage

Conditions Public Responsiveness to Policy

Outputs in the United States∗

Christopher J. Williams, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Martijn Schoonvelde, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Objective. Democratic governance requires that policy outcomes and public demand for policy
be linked. While studies have shown empirical support for such a relationship in various policy
domains, empirical evidence also indicates that the public is relatively unaware of policy outputs.
This raises a puzzle: Why do policy outputs influence public attitudes if the public knows little
about them? Methods. This study seeks to address this paradox by examining the conditioning
role of media coverage. We rely on data derived from the Policy Agendas Project in the United
States, allowing us to analyze the relationship between policy outcomes, public preferences, and
newspaper content across a long span of time (1972–2007). Results. Our results indicate that
public policy preferences respond to policy outputs, and that this relationship is strengthened by
greater media attention to a policy area. Importantly, our findings also indicate that without media
attention to a policy area, there is no direct effect of policy outputs on public demand for policy.
Conclusions. Media coverage appears to be a key factor for public responsiveness to occur. In the
absence of policy coverage by the media, public responsiveness to policy outputs is greatly reduced.

In the 2.5 years between announcing his candidacy for president in June 2015 and early
2018, Donald Trump has turned to Twitter to insult the New York Times nearly 200 times
and counting.1 Among the insults, Trump has referred to the New York Times as “failing,”
“bad,” “losing,” “disgusting,” “FAKE,” “phony,” and “wrong.” This negative rhetoric aimed
at the New York Times (and other outlets including CNN and the Washington Post) raises
questions about its impact on the public’s knowledge of governmental actions and, there-
fore, the public’s ability to respond to public policy. By actively discrediting mass media
outlets and discouraging public consumption of its coverage, does the link between public
policy outcomes and public policy preferences weaken? That is, is a credible and trusted
media necessary for public information and, therefore, required for democratic represen-
tation to work in a normatively expected manner? This study analyzes this possibility by
examining the effect of media coverage on the relationship between policy outcomes and
the public’s preferences, focusing on the United States from 1972 to 2007.
Representative democracy requires that public policy outputs and the wishes of citizens
are closely related (Pitkin, 1967; Dahl, 1971; Powell, 2000). Yet, while studies have found

∗
Direct correspondence to Christopher Williams, School of Public Affairs, University of Arkansas at Little
Rock, Little Rock, AR 72207 cjwilliams6@ualr.edu. All data and replication materials are available through
the website of Christopher Williams; further, multiple appendices are available through this website as well
www.christopherwilliamsphd.weebly.com.
1
The number of insults has been calculated using this convenient tool (accessed January 2018):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 99, Number 5, November 2018

C 2018 by the Southwestern Social Science Association
DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12525
1628 Social Science Quarterly
that the public responds to policy outputs in coherent and predictable ways (e.g., Wlezien
1995, 2004; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010), behavioral research has discovered that the public
is largely uninformed about policy outputs (see for example, Delli Carpini and Keeter,
1996; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008; Bullock, 2011). This raises a puzzle: If the public knows
little about policy outcomes, how can it meaningfully respond to them?
We argue that media coverage of a policy area plays an important role in public respon-
siveness to policy outcomes by increasing public information about that policy area, which
allows the public to respond to policy outputs in predictable ways. In testing our expec-
tations, we utilize data derived from the Policy Agenda Project concerning government
spending and media attention across several policy areas and years (1972–2007) in the
United States. Further, we use public opinion data regarding public policy preferences de-
rived from multiple survey organizations, and originally collected by Jennings and Wlezien
(2015).
This study contributes to a small but growing literature that shows how media content can
strengthen public responsiveness to policy (see, for example, Neuner, Soroka, and Wlezien,
n.d.; Hiaeshutter-Rice, Soroka, and Wlezien, 2017). In line with previous research, we
find that greater spending in a policy area is met with decreased relative public demand for
that policy (see Wlezien, 1995, 2004; Soroka and Wlezien, 2004, 2010). We also find that
greater media attention to a policy area strengthens this relationship, and that when media
coverage of a policy area is accounted for, the independent effect of government spending
on public policy preferences disappears. This indicates that—across a variety of policy areas
and over a long period of time—it is not policy outputs per se but, rather, policy outputs
in tandem with media coverage that drive public responsiveness.
To be sure, we do not claim that media content is the only source of public responsiveness,
since media reports can be biased, incomplete, and imprecise and other factors like the
public’s interest or exogenous political or economic shocks will matter as well (see Neuner,
Soroka, and Wlezien, n.d.). But the results we present do show that—at an aggregate
level—increased media coverage strengthens the link between policy outcomes and the
public’s policy preferences. These results on aggregate public responsiveness stand in strong
contrast with much micro-level research, which is more interested in, for example, the
deleterious impact of news bias and framing effects on preferences and knowledge of
individual consumers.
Furthermore, our findings add to the debate regarding the relationship between public
preferences and policy output (see, for example, Wlezien, 1995, 2004; Soroka and Wlezien,
2004, 2010). While research has suggested that the public does, in fact, account for policy
changes when forming policy preferences, the exact linkage between these two concepts
has been remarkably absent from the current literature.2 By exploring media coverage
as a moderating factor between policy outcomes and public policy across various policy
areas and over a long period of time, this study provides a clearer understanding of the
factors that link policy outputs and public policy preferences, thus contributing to a better

2
The sole exception to this is the work of Neuner et al. (n.d.), which examines whether both perceptions
of policy spending changes and media coverage of policy spending in the area of defense policy influence
public preferences for spending in this policy domain. This work speaks closely to the current study; however,
there are some key differences. First, Neuner et al. only examine a single policy domain, defense policy,
whereas the study at hand focuses on six distinct policy domains. Further, the work of Neuner et al. does not
examine how media coverage of a policy area combined with actual spending changes in that policy area
influence public preferences in that policy area. The current study, thus, suggests a different finding, that
the public notices policy spending changes due, in large part, to media reports. While differences do exist,
it is important, however, to note that the work of Neuner et al. and the below analysis do both support the
contention that media plays an important role in influencing public responsiveness to public policy outputs.
Mass Media and Public Responsiveness 1629
understanding of the workings of democratic governance. In our conclusion, we reflect on
the implications of our findings with regard to democratic governance, particularly in the
United States.

Theory

Policy output and public policy preferences have been found in multiple studies to
be endogenously related (see Wlezien, 1995, 2004; Soroka and Wlezien, 2004, 2010;
Pacheco, 2013). In order to increase the likelihood of reelection, policymakers respond to
public policy preferences by changing policy outputs. In turn, the public updates its policy
preferences in response to those outputs. For example, if the public wants more spending
in the area of defense policy, policymakers will respond by increasing spending in the area
of defense policy. This increase in defense spending will be met by a portion of the public
believing that the increase was too great and, therefore, that defense spending should be
decreased. This understanding implies the following hypothesis:

H1: Greater policy output in a given policy area will be met by a decrease in aggregate
public demand for policy in that domain.

Importantly, it is inferred from the literature on public responsiveness to policy outputs

that the public is reasonably informed regarding policy and governance (Wlezien, 1995,
2004; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010; Pacheco, 2013). After all, without a reasonable level of
information regarding policy, it is impossible for the public to respond in a meaningful
way. However, research has suggested that the public is ill-informed about actual policy
outputs (see, for example, Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008; Bullock,
2011). This raises the question: Under what conditions does the public become informed
about policy, and, in turn, respond to policy outputs? Previous studies have pointed at
the importance of salience for increasing information about policy among the public
(e.g., Wlezien, 2004; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010). As a policy becomes more salient,
public attitudes respond more strongly to policy outputs in that domain. Media coverage
increases policy salience among the public (McCombs and Shaw, 1972; see also Soroka,
2003). Without being reported on by the mass media, it is unlikely that the public learns
about policy output.
From this, it follows that variation in media content may affect both individual and
aggregate political knowledge. Recent empirical work has shown evidence for this claim
at the micro level. For example, Jerit et al. (2006) find that the volume of newspaper
reporting moderates the impact of socioeconomic status in explaining political knowledge.
De Vreese and Boomgaarden (2006:317) find that “exposure to news outlets with high levels
of political content (such as public television news and broadsheet newspapers) contributes
the most to knowledge gains.” Exposure to news outlets with less political content has
either no effects or slightly positive effects, depending on the type of content. In other
words, media content may drive political and/or policy-specific knowledge if it contains a
relevant “policy signal,” such as mentions of the policy area and the direction it is headed
(see, for example, Neuner, Soroka, and Wlezien, n.d.). Evidence for media effects at a more
aggregate level shows that media freedom and voter knowledge are related (Leeson, 2008;
Schoonvelde, 2014), while media freedom has also been found to moderate the strength of
public responsiveness (Hiaeshutter-Rice, Soroka, and Wlezien, 2017) across various policy
areas and countries.
1630 Social Science Quarterly
In short, information regarding a particular policy domain among the public should
increase with greater media attention to that policy domain. This information should
allow the public to more readily respond to changes in outputs in that policy domain.3
Thus, it can be hypothesized:
H2: Greater media attention to a given policy domain will result in a stronger effect of
policy output in that domain on aggregate public demand for policy in that domain.

Data and Measurement

To test our expectations, we combine public opinion data from Jennings and Wlezien
(2015) with government spending data and media attention data collected and compiled
through the Policy Agendas Project (PAP) for the United States. We focus on six policy areas
for which we have long time series: crime, defense, education, environment, health, and
welfare policy.4 In this section, we discuss the measures for our dependent, independent,
and control variables, as well as our analytical strategy.
The dependent variable used in testing both H1 and H2 is relative public preferences
for policy in a given domain. This variable is operationalized using data from Jennings and
Wlezien (2015), which were originally derived from data from survey organizations in the
United States from 1972 through 2007.5 It is based on the question: “Do you think the
government is spending too much, too little, or the right amount on [policy area]?”6
Following Jennings and Wlezien (2015), the specific operationalization of this variable is
“net support” for spending in a policy area. Net support takes the proportion of respondents
who say that spending in a policy area is “too little” and subtracts the proportion of
respondents who say that spending in a policy area is “too much.” A positive value thus
indicates that the proportion of the public that desires more spending in a policy area is
larger than the proportion of the public that desires less spending.7
The main independent variable used in testing H1 concerns the proportion of gov-
ernmental spending in a policy domain in a year. This variable is operationalized as the
proportion of the U.S. federal budget in a year that is dedicated to a particular policy
domain. Our measure of yearly policy area spending was derived using data from the U.S.
Budget Authority from Fiscal Year 1973 through Fiscal Year 2007, as compiled by the
Policy Agendas Project. These data were adjusted to represent 2009 U.S. dollars.
3
Importantly, the thermostatic theory of representation is more concerned with general policy domains
than specific policies. According to the thermostatic theory, the public has output preferences in various policy
domains. The public is expected to respond to policy changes insofar as all policy changes within a given
general policy domain change the level of spending (i.e., output) in that domain. Media attention to either a
general policy domain or a specific policy change should condition the relationship between policy output and
public policy preferences, as attention to either increases the salience of the general policy domain, which leads
to greater information regarding that domain area among the public. Further, media attention to a general
policy domain or specific policy, whether it be about policy decisions, debates, proposals, hearings, etc., should
increase the salience of the general domain of a specific policy, which produces greater information about that
policy domain among the public.
4
The PAP data were originally collected by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, with the support of
National Science Foundation grant numbers SBR 9320922 and 0111611, and were distributed through the
Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Neither NSF nor the original collectors of
the data bear any responsibility for the analysis reported here.
5
Unfortunately, data constraints regarding the measure of public preferences do not allow us to extend the
analysis beyond 2007.
6
The data used by Jennings and Wlezien (2015) and, therefore, used in this study do have some gaps.
Jennings and Wlezien (2015) addressed these gaps by linearly interpolating the data. We also use these linearly
interpolated values.
7
For descriptive statistics for all dependent and independent variables by policy area, see Table 1.
Mass Media and Public Responsiveness 1631
The main independent variable used in testing H2 is a multiplicative interaction variable.
To capture the influence of media on the effect of policy spending in a domain on public
policy preferences, the above measure of policy spending in a given year is multiplied by
a measure of the amount of attention paid to that particular policy area by the media in
a year.8 Media coverage is measured using data from the Policy Agendas Project, which
has collected a data set that is a “systematic random sample” of the New York Times Index
from 1946 to 2008 (49,201 records). Each entry is coded by the PAP as belonging to a
specific policy domain. For our purposes, we constructed yearly time series of the total
percentage of articles that deal with crime, defense, education, environment, health, and
welfare policy.9 That is, the number of articles from the “systematic random sample” of
the New York Times in a given year concerning a specific policy area is divided by the total
number of articles sampled in that year, and multiplied by 100.

Controls

Research shows that government spending may be correlated with the ideological make-
up of the government, with more liberal governments generally increasing spending, while
more conservative governments generally decrease spending (Wlezien, 2017). Thus, it is
important to control for government liberalism.10 In the context of the United States,
however, the budget process is particularly complex. Normally, the president submits a
budget request to Congress, which is then amended (i.e., marked up) by the two chambers
(the House of Representatives and the Senate) before being voted on by each body. Because
both the president and Congress have input into the U.S. budget, we include measures of
the ideological score of both the president and the House of Representatives. These measures
are based on the right–left coding found in the Comparative Manifestos Project data for
the party of the president, and the party of the Speaker of the House of Representatives
(Volkens et al., 2014).11 Furthermore, to account for the possibility that public opinion
and policy outputs are both related to economic conditions, we also include a measure of
yearly GDP growth as collected by the World Bank, based on constant 2010 U.S. dollars.

Analytical Strategy

Specification tests reveal serial correlation between observations within all six policy
areas included in our data set. Additionally, unit roots were found for all six policy areas.12
Further, based on Dickey–Fuller tests, cointegration or near-cointegration appears to be

8
Theoretically, changes in policy output in a policy domain could produce greater media coverage of that
domain. The data used in this study show little correlation between policy changes and media coverage of a
policy domain, with a Pearson’s R of 0.08.
9
This is a measure of media attention to general policy domains rather than specific policy outputs. This is
in line with the thermostatic theory of public responsiveness, which deals also with policy outputs as part of
larger policy domains.
10
Models excluding all government partisanship variables show similar results to our main models. However,
based on R2 , models including the partisanship variables fit better.
11
Robustness checks were run replacing this measure of the right–left position of the president and the
House of Representatives with DW-NOMINATE scores for the president and the median member of the
House of Representatives. The results of these tests are nearly identical to those reported below.
12
For the results of tests for serial correlation and unit roots, see Tables A.1 and A.2 in the supporting
appendices.
1632 Social Science Quarterly
present in the data.13 Therefore, we use error correction modeling (ECM) to test both
above hypotheses.
ECMs regress both first differences of the independent variables as well as a lagged version
of the independent variables on the first differences of the dependent variable. As such,
they allow us to directly address the short-run (contemporaneous) and long-run (lagged)
effects of the independent variables on change in the dependent variable. Diagnostics show
no unit roots for public policy preferences in any policy area after first differencing (see
Table A.2 in the Online Appendix). As the data pool six policy domains spanning from
1972 through 2007, the data are time-series cross-sectional.14 To address the panel nature
of our data, we use panel corrected robust standard errors.

Analysis

H1 argues that relative public preference for policy in an area will move in the opposite
direction of actual government output in that policy area. Models 1 and 2 in Table2
present the results of ECMs testing this hypothesis in the areas of crime, defense, education,
environmental, health, and welfare policy in the United States between 1972 and 2007.
Model 1 considers the effect of policy spending on relative public spending preferences,
controlling for the right–left positions of the president and House of Representatives and
GDP growth. It shows a statistically significant and negative relationship between spending
at time t–1 in a policy area and the change in relative preference for spending in that area
between times t–1 and t. This suggests that when spending in a policy area is greater at
time t–1, public demand for spending decreases between times t–1 and t. Substantively, if
spending in a policy area as a proportion of the budget is 0.60 at time t–1, one can expect
subsequent net support for spending in that policy area to be about 2.6 percent lower than
if spending on that policy area as a proportion of the budget is 0.50 at time t–1.
Model 2 adds an independent media attention variable. The results of this model are
similar to those in Model 1. Lagged policy spending is statistically significant and negatively
related to the change in the public’s relative spending preferences in a policy area. The
coefficient remains substantively comparable: an increase of 10 percent of the total budget
assigned to a policy domain decreases net support for spending in that policy domain by
0.025 points (i.e., 2.5 percent). Taken together, Models 1 and 2 indicate support for H1 of
this study, as well as support for the findings of previous research suggesting an endogenous
relationship between policy outputs and relative policy preferences.
Interestingly, Model 2 also shows a negative effect of lagged media attention in a policy
area on the change in the public’s relative preference for spending in that same policy
area. More concretely, when media attention to a policy area is greater at time t–1, public

13
For the results of tests for cointegration see Table A.3 in the supporting appendices. Research suggests
that the ECM can be used even in cases in which perfect cointegration is not present (see Keele and De Boef,
2004; De Boef and Keele, 2008; Enns et al., 2016).
14
To provide greater understanding of each domain, we tested the effect of public policy outputs on public
policy preferences by each policy domain. These results, which are presented in Table A.4 of the supporting
appendices (see Models A.1 through A.6), show a negative effect of public policy outputs in each domain on
public preferences for spending, with the exception of lagged spending in the area of defense policy. Likely due
to the small N (34) in each policy domain, this effect is statistically insignificant in all but one policy domain,
welfare policy. Generally speaking, however, these results suggest that each domain behaves as theoretically
expected within the thermostatic model. As welfare policy does show a particularly strong effect, we ran further
robustness checks using the pooled sample; however, we removed welfare policy from the sample (see Models
A.7 through A.9 of Table A.5 of the supporting appendices). The main finding that media attention conditions
the relationship between public policy outputs and public policy preferences still holds.
Mass Media and Public Responsiveness 1633
TABLE 1
Descriptive Statistics

Policy Preferences by Policy Area

Policy Area N Mean SD Minimum Maximum

Crime 35 61.829 5.793 51 71

Defense 35 −8.914 17.841 −33 48
Education 35 58.314 10.378 39 70
Environment 35 53.343 8.633 34 71
Health 35 61.886 7.684 49 74
Welfare 35 −28.057 12.379 −50 −11

Government Spending by Policy Area

Crime 35 0.010 0.004 0.006 0.018

Defense 35 0.212 0.043 0.151 0.290
Education 35 0.021 0.004 0.016 0.034
Environment 35 0.016 0.007 0.011 0.043
Health 35 0.057 0.023 0.028 0.100
Welfare 35 0.142 0.022 0.102 0.222

Media Coverage by Policy Area

Crime 36 6.335 1.399 4.522 12.573

Defense 36 3.649 1.723 0.647 8.696
Education 36 2.716 0.960 1.18 5.068
Environment 36 1.658 0.477 0.539 2.511
Health 36 2.572 1.294 1.208 8.419
Welfare 36 3.466 0.905 2.044 5.732

Control Variables

President 210 16.037 16.888 −19.8 33.6

House of Reps. 210 1.224 21.690 −21.2 33.314
GDP/Capita 210 3.105 1.952 −1.91 7.26

demand for spending in that policy area decreases between times t–1 and t. However, this
effect is considerably smaller than the spending effect, as evidenced by the much smaller
coefficient.
Model 3 presents the results of an ECM directly testing H2. The results of this model
show statistically significant and negative effects for both the interaction between lagged
media attention and lagged policy spending, as well as the interaction between the change
in media attention and the change in policy spending. These results indicate that the
effect of government spending in a policy area on relative public spending preferences
is conditioned by media attention to that policy area. Increased media attention—both
contemporaneous and lagged—strengthens the relationship between policy outputs and
public demand for spending as evidenced by the statistically significant negative interaction
terms. Substantively, the lagged interaction term indicates that, all else equal, the decrease
in net support for public spending that follows increased spending further decreases by
0.5 percent each time relative media coverage has increased by 1 percentage point.
Importantly, the constituent terms of change in spending and lag in spending are both
statistically insignificant. This means that, in a given year, spending in a policy domain
1634 Social Science Quarterly
TABLE 2
Effect of Policy Spending on Public Policy Preferences

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Public Policy Preferencest–1 −0.057∗∗∗ −0.056∗∗∗ −0.050∗∗∗

(0.015) (0.013) (0.010)
Spendingt–1 −0.259∗∗∗ −0.251∗∗∗ −0.023
(0.056) (0.053) (0.083)
࢞Spending −0.524 −0.512 −0.272
(1.044) (1.035) (0.924)
Media Attentiont–1 – −0.003∗ −0.001
(0.002) (0.001)
࢞ Media Attention – −0.002 −0.003
(0.002) (0.002)
Spendingt-1 ∗ Media Attentiont-1 – – −0.053∗∗∗
(0.009)
࢞Spending∗ ࢞ Media Attention – – −0.447∗∗∗
(0.155)
Presidential Right–Left −0.0002 −0.0002 −0.0002
(0.0005) (0.0005) (0.0004)
House Right–Left 0.0001 0.0001 0.0002
(0.0001) (0.0001) (0.0002)
GDP Growth −0.0003 −0.0003 −0.0002
(0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
Constant 0.046∗∗∗ 0.055∗∗ 0.042∗∗
(0.017) (0.022) (0.017)
Observations 204 204 204
Number of Policy Areas 6 6 6
R2 Within 0.099 0.105 0.107
R2 Between 0.040 0.182 0.150
R2 Overall 0.059 0.066 0.082
NOTE: Coefficients are directly interpretable effects of the independent variables on the change in policy
preferences between time t–1 and time t with panel corrected robust standard errors in parentheses.
∗∗∗ p ࣘ 0.01; ∗∗ p ࣘ 0.05; ∗ p ࣘ 0.10.

is estimated not to have any effect on net support for government spending if there is
no media reporting on that policy domain during that year. In other words, we find no
evidence for public responsiveness to spending in a policy area in the absence of media
coverage of that policy area, indicating strong support for H2. Media coverage, thus, may
act as a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for public responsiveness to occur. That
is, it takes three to tango.

Conclusion

In this study, we examined the conditioning effect of media coverage on the relationship
between policy outputs and public preferences across policy areas. Following earlier research
(see Wlezien, 1995, 2004; Soroka and Wlezien, 2004, 2010), we theorized that increased
spending in a policy domain is negatively associated with public preference for more policy
in that domain. We then built on this well-established research, arguing that the theoretical
requirement of a reasonably informed public for public responsiveness to policy outputs to
occur (see Wlezien, 1995, 2004; Pacheco, 2013) is met through greater media attention to
Mass Media and Public Responsiveness 1635
a particular policy area. That is, when the media pays (greater) attention to a policy area,
this will strengthen public responsiveness in policy preferences to public policy outputs.
In line with our expectations, we found an independent, negative relationship between
public policy spending and public responsiveness across multiple domains. We also found
that public responsiveness to policy outputs is strengthened by greater media attention
to a particular policy area. Importantly, we found no evidence of meaningful public
responsiveness to policy outputs in the absence of media coverage.
This study contributes to a small but growing literature that shows how media content can
strengthen public responsiveness to policy (see, for example, Neuner, Soroka, and Wlezien,
n.d., Hiaeshutter-Rice, Soroka, and Wlezien, 2017). For example, Neuner, Soroka, and
Wlezien employ various approaches (automated content analysis, MTurk-coded studies,
and ANES survey analysis) to show for defense policy in the United States “that spending
cues exist, that citizens can extract these cues from news content, and that this information
matters for perceptions of government spending, and thus to preferences for policy change”
(n.d.: 29). Our results—which are in line with the mechanisms proposed by Neuner,
Soroka, and Wlezien (n.d.)—add to these findings by showing that across various policy
areas, an increase in the amount of media coverage alone can serve as a minimal “policy
signal” or “spending cue” that strengthens public responsiveness. Additional data collection,
using new methods in automated text analysis, will be required to replicate these findings
across multiple countries and to unpack what aspects of increased policy coverage matter
most for increased public responsiveness.
More generally, these findings have important implications for our understanding of
democratic representation and responsiveness in the United States. Democracy requires that
policymakers respond to the public, providing it with its preferred policies (Pitkin, 1967;
Dahl, 1971; Powell, 2000). However, without public responsiveness to policy outputs,
policymakers have little incentive to respond to public preferences. The evidence we have
presented in this study suggests that without media coverage of policies, we will see little
responsiveness in public preferences to policy outputs. Put simply, without the presence of
widespread media coverage of a policy, democratic representation and responsiveness may
be much less likely to occur. This suggests that the regular allegations of the mainstream
media being “Fake News,” as well as armies of bots aimed at systematically decreasing the
“signal-to-noise ratio” of media coverage, are reasons for serious concern about the state of
public responsiveness and, therefore, democratic representation in the United States.

REFERENCES

Bullock, John G. 2011. “Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate.” American Political
Science Review 105(3):496–515.
Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
De Boef, Susan, and Luke Keele. 2008. “Taking Time Seriously.” American Journal of Political Science
52(1):184–200.
De Vreese, Claes H., and Hajo Boomgaarden. 2006. “News, Political Knowledge and Participation: The Differ-
ential Effects of News Media Exposure on Political Knowledge and Participation.” Acta Politica 41(4):317–41.
Delli Carpini, Michael X., and Scott Keeter. 1996. What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Enns, P. K., N. J. Kelly, T. Masaki, and P. C. Wohlfarth. 2016. “Don’t Jettison the General Error Correction
Model Just Yet: A Practical Guide to Avoiding Spurious Regression with the GECM.” Research and Politics
3(2): 1–13.
1636 Social Science Quarterly
Hiaeshutter-Rice, Dan, Stuart Soroka, and Christopher Wlezien. 2017. “Freedom of the Press and Thermo-
static Responsiveness.” 2017 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.
Jennings, Will, and Christopher Wlezien. 2015. “Preferences, Problems and Representation.” Political Science
Research and Methods 3(3):659–81.
Jerit, Jennifer, Jason Barabas, and Toby Bolsen. 2006. “Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environ-
ment.” American Journal of Political Science 50(2):266–82.
Keele, L., and S. De Boef. 2004. “Not Just for Cointegration: Error Correction Models
with Stationary Data.” Available at https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/papers/2005/Keele%20DeBoef%
20ECM%20041213.pdf.
Lewis-Beck, Michael S., William G. Jacoby, Helmuth Norpoth, and Herbert F. Weisberg. 2008. The American
Voter Revisited. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw. 1972. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public
Opinion Quarterly 36(1):176–87.
Neuner, Fabian, Stuart Soroka, and Christopher Wlezien. n.d. “Mass Media as a Source of Public Responsive-
ness.”
Pacheco, Julianna. 2013. “The Thermostatic Model of Responsiveness in the American States.” State Politics
and Policy Quarterly 13(3):306–32.
Pitkin, Hanna F. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Powell, G Bingham Jr. 2000. Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schoonvelde, Martijn. 2014. “Media Freedom and the Institutional Underpinnings of Political Knowledge.”
Political Science Research & Methods 2(2):163–78.
Soroka, Stuart N. 2003. “Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy.” International Journal of Press/Politics
8(1):27–48.
Soroka, Stuart N., and Christopher Wlezien. 2004. “Opinion Representation and Policy Feedback: Canada
in Comparative Perspective.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 37(3):531–59.
———. 2010. Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion, and Policy. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Volkens, Andrea, Pola Lehmann, Nicolas Merz, Sven Regel, Annika Werner, Onawa Promise Lacewell, and
Henrike Schultze. 2014. The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Berlin:
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB).
Wlezien, Christopher. 1995. “The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preference Spending.” American Journal
of Political Science 39(4):981–1000.
———. 2004. “Patterns of Representation: Dynamics of Public Preferences and Policy.” Journal of Politics
66(1):1–24.
———. 2017. “Policy (Mis) Representation and the Cost of Ruling: U.S. Presidential Elections in Comparative
Perspective.” Comparative Political Studies 50(6):711–38.

Supporting Information

Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information

section at the end of the article.
Appendix Table A.1: Durbin-Watson Test of Serial Correlation by Policy Areas
Appendix Table A.2: Dickey-Fuller Test for Stationarity of Public Policy Preferences by
Policy Areas
Appendix Table A.3: Tests for Cointegration Among Variables by Policy Area
Appendix Table A.4: Domain-by-Domain Effects
Appendix Table A.5: Effect of Policy Spending on Public Policy Preferences Excluding
Welfare Policy