Our first work package (BANK-LASH 1) aimed to establish what public opinion looks like in the area of financial regulation, in the countries we studied: Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. Based on a large survey conducted in 2020, we determined that in all six of the countries there is clear evidence that preferences for banking regulation form a coherent set of beliefs. Those beliefs, moreover, are distinct from conventional views about economic redistribution. We repeated that survey three years later (2023) in four of the six countries (France, Germany, UK and US), and we found exactly the same thing. In sum, views about financial regulation are driven by core values and by banking-related variables. They are NOT driven by ideology, political partisanship, or most of the measures associated with political populist attitudes.
Beyond measuring these preferences, we wanted to understand how media coverage of banking influences attitudes towards financial regulation. We had hypothesized in the Description of the Action that frames emphasizing scandal would work primarily through the emotion of anger and that they would increase support for financial regulation. We tested both these hypotheses in the second and third waves of our 2020 survey. We confirmed that reading about media coverage of scandals reliably increases preferences for financial regulation. We also found that anger mediates that effect. We published these results in an article in the American Journal of Political Science , entitled “Banklash: How Media Coverage of Bank Scandals Moves Mass Preferences on Financial Regulation.”
Using our 2020 data, we were further able to show, contrary to much of the existing literature on redistributive attitudes, that narrative frames not only influence views of banking regulation – they also influence attitudes on redistribution. Here our contribution was to demonstrate that it is not simple facts about the level of inequality that change preferences, but narratives about the sources of inequality. In other words, it is stories that change minds, not just facts. We published this piece in Comparative Political Studies.
Work package 2 aimed at answering our second research question, about the character of media coverage. We used machine-learning techniques to produce the first-ever comparative portrait of media coverage of banking issues, with coverage from 2007-2018. We discuss the development of these measurement techniques in section 1.2 because the techniques used are extremely cutting-edge and took us to the political science frontier of using large language models (similar to the underlying models used in generative AI such as ChatGPT).
What we found through the analysis of media coverage is consistent with our investigations of the impact of bank scandals on public opinion. Immediately after the financial crisis, media coverage of the crisis and financial bailouts was closely entwined with media coverage of financial regulation. However, from 2012 onward, media coverage of regulation marched in lock step with coverage of scandals. This is consistent with much of the work carried out on policymaking under the third work package, which found that scandals played an important role in raising salience at moments of passing laws.
Finally, the case studies of reform helped us to answer our third research question – under what conditions do we observe significant reforms of financial systems? Here, the project has shown the states with the reputation for where banks are the most powerful – the US, UK, and Switzerland – are also those where we have observed the most significant reform.
