دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی رسانه های جمعی و نسبت دادن اشتباه برای جهانی سازی - اشپرینگر 2017

Abstract

Much is known about the domestic politics of globalization, but political scientists have largely ignored one critical link between the international economy and many individuals around the world: mass media. Considering the likely effects of mass media on public perceptions of responsibility, this article develops an argument about the effects of mass media on individuals’ blame attributions for the adjustment costs of economic globalization. The theory is tested on survey data from France in 1992–1993. The evidence suggests that mass media may shift the public’s blame attributions away from the government and toward external, international forces.

Conclusion

This study has presented evidence that mass media condition a key link in the causal chain linking economic globalization to domestic politics. Survey evidence from France shows that individuals most reliant on mass media are less likely to blame top national problems on incumbent governments and more likely to blame international forces. Mass media indirectly deflect (weakly) blame away from incumbent governments and toward international forces by making individuals more aware of economic openness as a political issue, but it also directly decreases individuals’ propensities to blame incumbents relative to international forces (controlling for the awareness effect), most likely due to the responsibility-diffusing framing effects previously found in mass media studies. In turn, I find that individuals who blame international forces rather than the government evaluate the government more favorably. The key implication is that mass media may weaken one basis of electoral accountability for international economic policymaking. Mass media may diffuse the domestic political pressure against liberalization that has historically elicited welfare-state compensation for aggrieved domestic groups.

I have argued that France in the early 1990s is an attractive testing ground for the theory that media diffuse blame attributions because it provides least-likely conditions for finding evidence of the theory: insofar as France in the 1990s represented an atypically high baseline for the public tendency to see globalization as a policy decision and therefore attributable to government, evidence that media dampen government blame attributions in such a context suggests such a tendency will also be observed in more typical contexts where the theory appears even more likely to hold. Nonetheless, given the national and historical context of the sample used in this study, there are still important limitations to the conclusions that can be drawn. The first and most obvious issue is that many national media environments are dramatically different today than they were in the early 1990s. Has the rise of the World Wide Web and now social media affected the blame-diffusing effect of mass media reported here? Qualitative and quantitative aspects of international economic integration have also changed much since the early 1990s. Does the current rise of populist, right-wing economic nationalism reflect a fundamentally different relationship between globalization, media, and public opinion? Clearly these are important questions this study cannot answer. More research using more contemporary data, ideally across multiple countries, will be necessary to make headway on these more general questions.