Good News and Bad News: Asymmetric Responses to Economic Information

There is a growing body of work suggesting that responses to positive and negative information are asymmetric— that negative information has a much greater impact on individuals ’ attitudes than does positive information. This paper explores these asymmetries in mass media responsiveness to positive and negative economic shifts and in public responsiveness to both the economy itself and economic news coverage. Using time-series analyses of U.K. media and public opinion, strong evidence is found of asymmetry. The dynamic is discussed as it applies to political com-munications and policymaking and more generally to public responsiveness in representative democracies. prospect theory suggest a somewhat similar dynamic. Asymmetric responses to positive and negative news by media, public, and policymakers are both likely and widespread. This paper seeks to draw research in political science together with research from other fields and build a more thorough account of the magnitude and pervasiveness of asymmetric responses to informa-tion. In particular, this paper draws together asym-metries evident in public opinion and asymmetries evident in media content. Both may be produced by the same individual-level processes; both may also be regular features of representative democracy. Asymmetries in media and public responsiveness are investigated here using aggregate-level time-series data for the United Kingdom from 1986 to 2000. The paper begins with a discussion of recent work on asymmetric responses to information. A content analysis of economic news in The Times (London) is then used to examine (1) the link between news cov-erage and the actual economy and (2) the relationship between the economy, media coverage and public opinion. Results provide strong evidence of asymmet-ric responses to positive and negative information. Asymmetric Responses to Information There is a growing body of work suggesting asymme-try in responses to negative versus positive informa-