Banklash: How Media Coverage of Bank Scandals Moves Mass Preferences on Financial Regulation

Abstract

Financial regulation is often adopted in the wake of scandals and crises. Yet political science has little to say about the political effects of corporate scandals. We break that silence, asking whether exposure to news coverage of bank scandals changes the preferences of voters for financial regulation. Drawing from the literatures on media influence and public opinion, we argue that news coverage of bank scandals should increase voters' appetite for regulation. We test our hypothesis with data from six countries, using original nationally representative panel surveys with embedded experiments (total N = 27,673). Our pooled and country-specific analyses largely support our expectation that exposure to news coverage of scandals increases regulatory preferences. We reproduce this finding in a separate survey wave, using different scandals than in our original analysis. These results contribute to studies on media influence on public opinion, the political significance of scandals, and the political economy of regulation.Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GTSYTZ. I t is scandalous how little political science has to say about the political impact of corporate scandals. Scandals involving politicians can topple a government. They are thus fertile terrain for studying scandal effects on voting intentions (Arias et al. 2018;Dziuda and Howell 2021;Entman 2012;Nyhan 2014). However, this tight focus on what Hacker and Pierson (2010) call "politics as electoral spectacle" limits the purview of politics to office seeking, to the neglect of policy seeking. Corporate scandals can disrupt markets and inflict mayhem on the lives of ordinary people, making them consequential to the outcome of policy battles. Such scandals can upend the traditionally dominant position of business interests in securing their preferred outcomes on economic regulation (Culpepper 2011;Hertel-Fernandez, Mildenberger, and Stokes 2019).Indeed, previous work characterizes it as an iron law that financial regulation in the United States is enacted quickly and with insufficient information in the wake of scandals and crises (Romano 2005; 2014, 56-57). Such scandals also manifest the power to overturn previously steadfast opposition to regulation. The

The Financialization of Housing and Its Political Consequences

“…With respect to views about financialization, mobilizations against finance capitalism, and support for its regulation extend across countries. German citizens have similar views about regulating the finance industry as do citizens in other OECD countries (Culpepper, Jung and Lee 2023), even if the country's path towards financialization has been more contested when compared to Anglo-American countries (Engelen and Konings 2010).…”