By Eleanor Conrad
July 19, 2024
Political Scientists studying the effects of media consumption on perceptions of the U.S. economy appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio in late July to discuss their research findings. One of the major motivations for their research project was the great difference between how many Americans feel about the status of the American economy and the actual state of the U.S. economy. Mark Copelovitch and Michael Wagner discussed their two-year research project on the impact of media consumption on voter’s views of the economy as a political issue on “Wisconsin Today.”
“It used to be, in the past, that consumer sentiment and public perceptions of the economy would decline when the economy was bad in material terms and then it would go back up when the economy as doing better, and now, what has happened in the last decade, especially the last couple of years, is that there is this very wide gap [between perceptions of the economy and the reality]. So, the motivation for us in this project is to try and understand what is going on there. Why do people think the economy is not doing well when, by all of these material metrics, the economy seems to be doing well?” said Mark Copelovitch, Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs, Jean Monnet Chair in the European Union and the Global Economy, and Director of European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Copelovitch and Wagner have studied multiple variables that are traditionally seen as influencing people’s opinions about the economy, such as demographics, education, and personal financial situations. They also incorporated homeownership and commuting in their study, to determine how fluctuations in interest rates and gas prices could impact perceptions of the economy. However, their research showed that the most significant variable was where a person found their information, i.e. what news and media they consumed.
According to Copelovitch, “It’s not just that the information variables [news sources] matter, but that they seem to be the single largest determinant of what people think about the economy.”
“The more entrenched our talk networks and our information use networks, the more polarized, the more extreme, we tend to become, and the more certain, unfortunately, we tend to become in our preferences,” said Michael Wagner, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea, Director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal (CCCR), and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Looking at coverage in context really matters,” Wagner added. With the media playing such a large role in molding perceptions of the state of the economy, journalists could play a role in shaping more realistic views of the economy. Wagner recommends providing additional context, such as comparing the present state of the economy to the economy in previous years, and he encourages reporters to “push back on people who are making claims that are demonstrably false.”
In addition, having access to more global context can contribute to a more complete perspective on the U.S. economy, Copelovitch said. “One of the things we did in the study was an experiment where we gave half the people who took the survey (out of two thousand) global context. We did the survey in August of 2022. At that point, most of the inflation was being caused by the energy shock and the food price shock from the war in Ukraine, whereas most of the political rhetoric and media coverage in the U.S. had been about Jo Biden’s fiscal policy and US domestic focus factors that were driving inflation, and that had a really interesting effect because it differed across parties.”
The results? More republican-leaning respondents became less concerned about inflation than other economic factors like unemployment and recession, and democratic-leaning respondents became more concerned. WPR journalist Kate Archer Kent asked Copelovitch whether he has noticed a similar phenomenon in other parts of the world, “The general reaction is, ‘Yes,” He said, “But the [non-U.S.] media ecosystems are very different. People watch local news. There are a handful of national news networks, and people watch the nightly news. There’re a small number of national and regional papers, and most people under fifty or forty-five read them. It is a much more historically traditional media ecosystem that doesn’t look like the U.S. today, where you know everybody is getting their information from social media. There’s a small amount of that in Germany but it is much, much different.”
Listen to the complete episode here.