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This article argues that negative news coverage of politically relevant social issues stimulates political participation by shaping citizen awareness of collective problems and interest in politics. By drawing citizen attention to social problems that government may attend to, the press acts as a sentinel for the mass public, cuing them to periods when participation is more important. Drawing on an analysis of the 1974 National Election Study in combination with the Center for Political Studies' content analysis of newspapers, I find evidence that bad news about issues is good news for participation.
I thank Diana Mutz, James Baughman, Charles Franklin, Richard Merelman, Virginia Saprio, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions that improved this article. The Miller Center of Public Affairs provided a scholarly environment complete with a porch and rocking chairs conducive to completing this article.
Notes
1. Interest groups seem to proliferate in the face of perceived threats to their interest (Lowery & Gray, 1993), and memberships in interest groups receive a boost when interests are threatened (Hansen, 1985).
2. The contextual threat of concentrations of Black Americans is thought to condition the political behavior of White southerners in opposition to Blacks (Giles & Buckner, 1993; Giles & Hertz, 1994; Wright, 1977).
3. While citizens may become more likely to participate when they see more problems for symbolic reasons, collective problems can also become political opportunities. Hence, citizens could rationally choose to participate to try to further their party's interests when election stakes are higher. Given weak parties and American lack of interest in politics, it seems more likely that citizens will participate out of disinterested duty rather than partisan interest. Moreover, modern civic expectations placed on citizens fit better with notions of obligations to society rather than to political parties (Schudson, 1998). In short, participation in reaction to awareness of collective problems is most likely symbolic rather than instrumental.
4. This type of political motivation need not be cast in this positive light. People may also decline to participate in politics because they fail to make the connections between the problems they see and politics. Many things that theorists of politics would consider political (i.e., where values are being authoritatively allocated) are not conceived of as being political by citizens (Gaventa, 1980), or at least not connected to the political institutions that could address the problems (Merelman, Streich, & Martin, 1998). If the problems that people face most often are defined as being nonpolitical (e.g., private issues such as business downsizing or gender relations), then it is unlikely that they will act on them politically (Kinder & Kiewiet, 1981; Sniderman & Brody, 1977). When more things are brought into the perceived realm of political problems, either by the development of political consciousness or by politicizing increases in the perceived prevalence of problems, people become more engaged in politics.
5. Stories of good news should not counterbalance stories about bad news in how they affect problem awareness. Exposure to two bad news stories and two good news stories should have a similar effect as two bad news and no good news stories.
6. The data used in this article were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data for the CPS media content analysis study (1974) were originally collected by the Center for Political Studies of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, under a grant from the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.
7. See Miller, Goldenberg, and Erbring (1979) or Erbring, Goldenberg, and Miller (1980) for a fuller description of content analysis procedures.
8. This citation refers to the codebook that accompanies the computerized data set.
9. The categories are economy, crime, government, national defense, health care, education, agriculture, public morality, natural resources, poverty, civil rights, business/labor issues, immigration, infrastructure, and consumer protection. However, the top five categories were consistently economy, crime, national defense, poverty, and government for the period 1974 through 1980, and economy, crime, national defense, poverty, and health care for 1982 through 1996. The top five categories make up between 80% and 90% of all mentions for every year.
10. The inclusion and operationalization of political interest is admittedly problematic because it likely taps long-standing political interest as well as short-term interest that would vary. The finding from indicating that bad news affected political interest gives greater credence to the presence of a short-term effect, but it most likely has a sizable long-standing component.
11. Further investigation of the effects of negative news showed no effects of negativity on political information in 1974; however, the total number of stories, irrespective of tone, predicts political information (available from the author on request).