Agenda setting and policy punctuations in English urban policy: the role of the media and public opinion1 Peter John

School of Politics and Sociology, Malet St, London WC1E 7HX, UK, p.john@bbk.ac.uk Paper to the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop, ‘Political Agenda Setting and the Media’, Uppsala, 13-18 April 2004 1. The project was funded by a Nuffield Foundation small grant. I thank the Foundation for its support. I also thank Rainbow Murray and Sachiko Muto for their help in coding the data.

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Political scientists have commonly identified long periods of stability and self-

containment, which are interspersed with bursts of rapid change and ‘breakout’ from

established routines and monopolies. On the one hand, the political process can

become sticky, out of inertia or from rent-seeking by bureaucracies and interest

groups; on the other, after the build-up of reaction to problems or in response to new

ideas, there can be significant disruption of existing routines and rapid departure from

the usually limited circles of interaction and decision-making. It would seem that

both such processes are functional for societies and political systems – stability for

continuity; break out for necessary learning and the transformation. But both can be

dysfunctional because stability can be associated with conservatism, lack of learning,

ossification and unjustified concentrations of power whilst punctuations arise from

lack of planning and impulsive behaviour, which can lead to policy disasters.

This paper leaves aside such normative concerns, and seeks to identify the causal

pathways that lead from stability to punctuations and back again. In particular, it is

concerned with identifying the likely ‘transmission belts’ between some sorts of

social process and others, whereby the extent of attention to a particular agenda starts

to jump from one particular arena to another. In agenda setting, one of the crucial

areas for the consideration of agendas is the media, which processes issues, and which

may have a link to public opinion, on the one hand, and policy outputs on the other.

The paper seeks to explore the origins of shifts in the political agenda, through a

content analysis of media data in urban policy, and links to public opinion and

political events, setting out the beginnings of an analysis to explain policy outputs.

The main research questions are, first, identify the punctuations in media and public

opinion and, second, to seek what are the causes for those punctuations, whether they

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derive from seismic changes in political behaviour rather than from ‘internal’ process

of agenda setting according to the interaction of ideas and organisational processes.

Punctuations and agenda setting

In the study of public policy, researchers have tended to emphasise the stability of

decision-making in a particular sector of activity. Traditionally incrementalism

emphasised the legacy of the past in current decisions, norms of behaviour, rules of

thumb and interest-group deadlock (Dahl and Lindblom 1953, Lindblom 1959,

Braybrook and Lindblom 1963, Davis et al 1966, Davis et al 1974, Lindblom 1975,

Lindblom 1979, Jones et al 1997). When analysing budgets researchers, such as

Wildavsky (1984) in the US and Rose in the UK (Rose and Davies 1993), emphasised

the importance of last year’s budget and the reality that programmes are typically

inherited from the past. The result is the sheer difficulty of launching new

programmes and carrying out massive expansions of existing ones. Researchers on

policy networks in the UK and US (Richardson and Jordan 1979, Marsh and Rhodes

1992) stress how the possibility of change was locked in by the functional dependence

of the executive on interest groups, the dominance of those groups of the agenda

because of their expertise and control over their members, and the relative secretive

nature of policy-making. More generally, UK researchers in the 1970s believed

governments had become overloaded and increasingly unable to make decisions as

their capacity decreased and their dependence on producer groups increased (King

1980, Birch 1984). In the 1980s and 1990s, US commentators sought to test the idea

that the US system was similarly apparently unable to process decisions because of

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institutional fragmentation, a factor that was exacerbated by partisanship instability

and personalisation, which led to the weak party control and differential voting

patterns depending on the institution (Mayhew 1991).

Stability has never been the exclusive characteristic of policy-making. As has been

noted by Baumgartner and Jones, incrementalists did examine breaks from periods of

stability (Davis et al 1996: 351). In general, tests of gridlock upheld Mayhew’s null

findings (Binder 1999). In British politics, there has been a tradition of observing

deviations from trend owing to oscillation of two- party politics (Finer 1975), the

simple version of which was the object of criticism by Rose (1980). More generally,

countries have been subjected to periods of much studied partisan-introduced sets of

policy changes, such 1945-51 in the UK (Hennessy 1992). The conventional view of

policy-making as characterised party consensus on the key issues – Butskellism – has

been challenged by more detailed political histories (e.g. Glennerster 2000). Some

accounts of British politics stress the tendency to policy lurches, leading to disasters,

which derive from aspects of the British governing system – the ease of law-making,

centralisation, the structure of decision-making in cabinet, ministerial hyper-activism,

and civil service culture (Dunleavy 1995, Gray 1998).

Public policy scholars in the 1990s became much more interested in analysing the

impacts sudden bursts of change, such as Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s account of the

role of external shocks, which can shift the set of governing coalitions (Sabatier and

Jenkins-Smith 1993, Sabatier 1999); Kingdon’s metaphor of policy windows, where

entrepreneurs were capable of seizing a particular policy idea and pushing it forward

if the streams come together (Kingdon 1984); and finally Baumgartner and Jones’s

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model of punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner and Jones 1991, 1993; Jones 1994,

2001; Jones et al 1998; True et al 1999; True 2000; Baumgartner and Jones 2002;

Jones et al 2003 Policy Agendas Project, University of Washington,

http://depts.washington.edu/ampol/navResearch/agendasproject.shtml), whereby long

periods of stability and policy monopolies could give way to punctuations and then a

return to stability once more. Jones, in particular, has directed particular attention to

the tendency for agendas to expand in a non-linear fashion, whereby issues have a

tendency to grab policy-makers’ attention precisely because most decision-makers are

boundedly rational. They move from one issue to another because of the tendency for

the most prominent issue to dwarf the rest. Agendas can gather momentum rapidly

because of the way in which interested parties, such as those in the media, attach

themselves to a new issue, which means that, once agendas have enough impetus to

change, they ‘expand’ in a non-linear fashion, moving rapidly from stasis to

innovation, what Baumgartner and Jones call the process of ‘positive feedback' (1993:

125). The phenomenon of serial processing of information by decision-makers, which

in times of stability serves to prevent policy change, also ensures they increasingly

focus on new issues to the exclusion of others once the agenda shifts. The result is

that ‘some problems gain disproportionate attention from many policy venues’

(Baumgartner and Jones 1993: 250). More policy-makers become involved because

‘the diffuse jurisdictional boundaries that separate the various overlapping institutions

of government can allow many governmental actors to become involved in a new

policy area’ (True et al 1999: 99). In Jones and Baumgartner’s language, the ‘issue

monopolies’ that govern policy sectors, like urban policy or nuclear power, break

down and become re-established later, but at a new equilibrium point, where a new

constellation of interest groups and institutional rules cement a set of policy proposals

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into place until the next punctuation. Under this model, ‘punctuations are a regular

and important feature of US budget making and US policymaking’ (True et at al,

1999: 111).

The origins of punctuations

The Baumgartner and Jones’s approach has generated a number of tests of policy

changes through committee hearings (Baumgartner and Jones, 1991: 1062-3; 1993:

193-215, Jones et al 1993; Talbert et al 1995; Wilkerson et al 2002; Feeley 2002),

media outputs (Baumgartner and Jones 1993: 103-125), public opinion records

(Baumgartner and Jones 1991, 1993), public regulations, such as laws (Baumgartner

and Jones 1991: 1058), budgets (Jones et al 1997, 1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2003,

Mortensen 2001, Feeley 2002, Robinson 2004) and stock market changes (Jones and

Sulkin 2003). It seems that punctuations do exist in policy outputs and in the media,

and also in other arenas (Jones et al 2003).

There has been less attention to the reason for punctuations and what they indicate for

the veracity of the democratic process, which is the focus of this paper. Work so far

identities several sources of punctuations. The first is the familiar aforementioned

one of partisan change, whereby policy outputs are shaped by the ideological

positions of parties that have a bundle of preferences about the direction of

government decision-making, which may turn into spending or other outputs. With a

change in government or the composition of a coalition comes a new set of

preferences. Some elections may be particularly strong examples of partisan change

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if they come from a sea-change in political debate. There are some tests of change of

partisanship for public spending (Hofferbert and Budge 1992). Along with the

criticism of the no change hypothesis is a stream of work that demonstrates that party

politics matters for the output of nations (Castles 1982, Garrett 1998, Swank 2002),

even in the face of apparently homogenising forces of economic competition, and by

implication changes in partisanship, such as for budgets. Such considerations appear

in Jones et al’s (1998) work on budgets where they associate changes in budgets with

changes in partisanship. Similarly, Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) identify change

in the advocacy coalitions with the Reagan presidency, for example; and Kingdon

looks at political changes as a cause for the emergency of policy windows.

However, it would be fair to say that partisanship does not figure very highly in recent

accounts of agenda and policy change. In terms of democratic theory, here we have a

potentially non-elite cause of punctuation, closer to the democratic ideal, whereby

new issues affect voting behaviour that in turn affect party positions. Here the debate

links to the now solid stream of work that shows how public opinion affect the policy

position and outputs of governments (e.g. Page and Shapiro 1983, Wlezien 1996,

2004), though qualified by venue (Soroka and Lim 2003, Soroka and Wlezien 2004a,

2004b). Of course, such partisan changes may have come about through changes in

attention in the media and shifts in the elites’ stances, which in turn affect public

opinion and voting behaviour, directions of influence something that more

sophisticated accounts of causation can adjudicate upon (see Edwards and Wood

1999, Soroka 2002a).

The second cause of punctuations is the sudden shocks mentioned earlier, which are

usually large socio-political events, such as the oil embargo of the 1970s, which

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shatter policy routines and force onto the agenda new issues and ideas by their sheer

magnitude. Massive problems need to be solved, and newly powerful groups needs to

be assuaged or brought into the policy process. These events are probably more

distant from democratic process than public opinion and partisan change because the

elite has to respond to environment changes rather than to a new will; but it is possible

that public opinion and partisan orientation will move in the same direction as the

leaders respond to change. Moreover, external change may be closely linked to the

behaviour of excluded groups that seek to seize the agenda.

The third source of radical agenda and policy change is through the emergence of new

ideas, which can suddenly ‘hit’ a political system. Here policy entrepreneurs may be

able to sell an idea to leaders and publics, and once it catches on it can be

unstoppable. Such a concept also appears to a limited extent in Sabatier’s model of

policy change, though he argues that policy-makers and agenda-setters are

‘hardwired’ into their core beliefs. Here we have the emergence of new ideas in

policy, which may arise from new research or from transfer of practices across

nations. It also links to the idea that propagators may gain the attention of executives,

which then seek to influence the media and public opinion, depending on the policy

issue (Hill 1998). The alternative is where policy entrepreneurs sell the idea to the

media, where it takes hold and in turn influences the policy agenda, on the one hand,

and public opinion, on the other. Here the idea is that media acts as a gatekeeper

between mass public and executive leaders, which may reflect the selective pressure

of particular interest-group entrepreneurs (Baumgartner and Jones 1993: 106). The

direction of causation from the media to public opinion and/or executive priorities is

central to much agenda setting research (e.g. Cobb and Elder 1971, 1970, Soroka

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2002a), with some research focusing on the positive and significant influence of the

media on public opinion on the one hand (McCombs and Shaw 1972, Winter and Eyal

1981, Cook et al 1983, Soroka 2002) and on policy adoptions on the other (Carpenter

2002).

These perspectives give an indication of the origins of radical agenda and policy

change. As the discussion indicates, they are not entirely exclusive in that they may

run together, such as external events and partisan change. Nonetheless, they suggest

certain hypotheses: the punctuations will be associated with partisan changes and a

prior shift in public opinion; second that agenda change will be associated with large

events such as rises in urban political violence; third that debates and changes will

drive punctuations, so that the media is seen to influence the policy debate.

Urban policy change

Urban policy concerns targeted government programmes that aim to remedy acute

spatially concentrated patterns of unemployment, urban decay, and associated social

problems, often in the core of urban areas. One of the consequences of economic

growth is a tendency for urban growth and decay to have a spatial pattern and

dynamic, particularly as growth occurs in certain locales, even within a metropolis,

and for areas to lose their economic advantage through competition with other areas

and from technological change. Underlying this process are the powerful forces that

create inequality, such as population movements, and the way in which aspects of

disadvantage tend to reinforce each other. On top of that is the tendency for minority

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groups to live in these deprived areas where the lack of access to jobs is compounded

by discrimination.

In the west, governments at first believed that they only needed to intervene in the

macro-economy and that the market would sort out these inequalities. But the

persistence of pockets of poverty and unemployment in the 1960s, at a time of rising

prosperity, and the confidence of social science to develop techniques to improve

society, led governments, such as those in the US and in the UK, to intervene more

selectively. Moreover, there have been bursts of activism and reform that have

reflected many political pressures, as well as tendency to replace programme because

of frustration that many do not appear to work (see Robson 1994). Urban policies

typically suffer from successful bursts of activism, which both reflect ministerial

activism and distinct waves of intervention that surrounded the creation of urban

policy: the activism of the Labour governments in the 1970s, then targeted initiatives

to revive urban markets by the Conservatives first in the early 1980s associated with

the urban development corporations, which rapidly expanded expenditure up the mid

1980s and then the Action for Cities set of initiatives that followed the 1987 election,

and then the reform of urban policy through the Single Regeneration Budget in 1993,

with a lessening of attention to urban issues after that date. This makes the key dates

as 1968, the creation of the Urban Programme; the reform of the urban polices from

1975 that led to the 1977 White Paper; the creation of new targeted regeneration

policies by the Thatcher governments in 1982-5; and then in a further period of

reform in 1987-89, and then in 1993.

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It is plausible to apply the three models to explore these policy initiatives. In urban

policy, although there is a high degree of partisan agreement on matters such as the

need for government to remedy market failure, political parties can disagree about the

causes of inner city deprivation, such as the extent to which new forms of regulation

are needed or whether substantial transfers of funds are the key, as in the traditional

social-democratic version of the operation and effects of markets. Partisan change

may have been associated with the creation of the urban policy in 1968, with the

activities of a Labour government keen to forge new sets of voting patterns.

Similarly, urban policy fashion in the 1980s followed the election of a Conservative

government that wanted to impose a business agenda on deprived areas.

Radical changes may have occurred to promote these changes. A core idea in the

neo-pluralist perspective is that inequalities of political and economic power may

addressed by more extreme forms of political behaviour that react to those

inequalities. What radical political action can achieve is issue expansion in the classic

agenda-setting mode, by causing an issue to rise onto the agenda. We may think of

riots as collective outbreaks of violence, with an element of spontaneity, which

usually affect inner cities and are often associated with the poor and excluded, and

which usually challenge elites either to respond in terms of law and order spending or

improved welfare. In neo-pluralists terms riots represent a form of political

communication from the poor to the governed, where they operate as a compensation

for the failure of traditional mechanisms of democracy (Lipsky 1970). They can

punctuate the political agenda and compensate for the operation of traditional biases

in favour of established interests (Cobb and Elder 1971: 913). Then there is the

interaction of political violence with the stances and ideological positions of political

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parties’ beliefs, which may affect the extent to which a political party may react to

these events, as well as reactions from the media (Button 1978). Riots can stimulate

policy change by causing issues such as urban poverty, the needs of the ethnic

populations, and the conditions of the inner cities to be considered by policy-makers

who fear repeated acts of violence and react to dramatic media commentary. In 1960s

USA and 1980s UK, black violence was linked to a host of grievances, such as poor

housing and unemployment, which provoked a social policy response. Thus the

1960s riots stimulated policy-makers in riot states and cities to allocate federal aid

programmes, in particular the Aids to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to

inner city populations (Piven and Cloward 1972: 196-198, 240-245, Hicks and Swank

1983, Fording 1997, 2001), and a range of other programmes (Button 1978).

Piven and Cloward place their argument in a more complex intersection of political

violence and public policies whereby the social programmes of the 1960s expressed in

part a political project to integrate the disruptive poor populations. Overall they adopt

a social control rather than a political communication perspective, but gains are still

there to be had. Their approach is summed up by the much-quoted phrase: ‘a placid

poor get nothing; but a turbulent poor sometimes gets something’ (Piven and Cloward

1972: 338). Such changes may only last a short period of time. A social control

perspective would suggest that that state actors respond to the demands created by

political violence, in which case the welfare spending should return to trend (Fording

2001: 115-116).

In England, the 1960s civil disturbances, the 1970s race riots, the 1980s riots, and the

1985 riots do seem quite close to the policy changes described earlier. In particular,

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the riots of the early 1980s triggered extensive public discussion and official

deliberation, such as the Scarman report of 1981. There was ministerial interest on

the part of Michael Heseltine, who visited Merseyside, activities which led to the

creation and extension or the urban development corporations.

The third set of changes may have been promoted by extensive discussion of policy

alternatives, which is particularly common in urban policies subject as it is to changes

in fashion and experimentation. Policy transfer from the US was particularly apparent

in the 1960s (Batley and Edwards 1978) and also in the 1980s, with Urban

Development Corporations (UDCs) and Enterprise Zones - all copied from the North

American experience. In this case we would expect punctuations in policy attention

to be ahead of media attention to these issues. This may be entirely plausible as urban

policy is particular subject to ministerial entrepreneurship – the case of Michael

Heseltine has already been mentioned, but there are numerous other ministers who

have shown an interest. Here we expect policy change to precede media and public

opinion change

Data collection

The research identifies policy and agenda change in urban policy from 1964-2003,

dates chosen to encompass the whole of the Urban Programme, through a coding of

media attention, public opinion and policy outputs. The project is not finished so the

full results cannot be presented here, in particular the budget data has not been

completed, but some of the media and public opinion data is available.

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The media’s attention data is drawn from two sources: Lexis-Nexis and the The

Times Digital Archive. The former is an electronic newspaper record of stories

(Financial Times from 1982, The Times since 1985; other newspapers from later

dates), which can be listed according to pre-chosen selection terms. The latter records

the incidence of The Times extended back from 1985 to way before the cut-off period

of 1966. The analysis presented here is about The Times. The coders examined

media attention of the term ‘inner city’ and ‘riot(s)’. The coders had to develop a

code frame to determine when articles should be included and excluded, which

involved developing criteria to exclude articles that were not within English urban

policy on the former term, for example articles on European urban policy and terms

for riot that were for irrelevant topics, such as gardening (e.g. ‘riot of colour’). More

troublesome were occasions of riots were not linked to the urban context, such as

football and prison riots, which could conceivable be linked to urban problems, say in

deprived areas, but in the end we excluded them. It should be noted that the term riot

indicates both the occurrence of riots and media attention. For this piece, it is not

important where the riot occurs, though subsequent research will test the hypothesis

that riot cities get more resources, which is the central thrust of the test of the Piven

and Cloward thesis.

Public opinion data was drawn from Gallup polls (King and Wybrow 2001: 262-

273). Soroka and Wlezien (2004a, 2004b) have used the repeated annual question,

‘Do you think that the government is spending too much, too little or about the right

amount on …’, with respect to policy areas. But there was no question on an urban

policy issue, so we used ‘What would you say is the most urgent problem facing the

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country at the present time?’, with a choice of responses. The basket of responses

started in 1966, changed in 1978, and again in 1989, to reflect the changing character

of public issues. The core list remained unchanged. The project coded the

percentage of respondents indicating an issue was the most urgent problem.

The policy outputs are key events, such as pieces of legislation and new programmes,

and annual budgets for urban policy. There is no central record of urban policy

budget totals, so the painstaking process collecting them from the parliamentary

estimates is still in train to be ready for a later version of this paper.

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Media attention

The media’s attention to urban policy issues can be captured by The Times’s

representation of the term ‘inner city’ which is synonymous with urban policy

matters. Figure 1 shows the monthly hits from 1966.

Figure 1: monthly hits of ‘inner city’ for the Times 1966-95

Date

Jul 1994

Jan 1993

Jul 1991

Jan 1990

Jul 1988

Jan 1987

Jul 1985

Jan 1984

Jul 1982

Jan 1981

Jul 1979

Jan 1978

Jul 1976

Jan 1975

Jul 1973

Jan 1972

Jul 1970

Jan 1969

Jul 1967

Jan 1966

Incl

uded

arti

cles

for i

nner

city

in th

e Ti

mes

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

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What this graph shows is the changes in the patterns of interest over time, with almost

no interest in the term in mid to late 1960s, but a gradual increase since that time, with

apparent punctuations around 1975, and then 1981, and then 1987. These were times

of important policy changes, with 1975 being the time of the 1975 policy change, and

1987, so it is not clear whether the media follows rather than creates the policy

interest. Nonetheless, the data seem punctuated at these points, and with a permanent

increase in interest from 1985. In fact the data also seem to correspond with the

political violence of these times with the increase in activity around 1981-1982, which

then falls back, but with a much larger increase around January 1984 which then

peaks and remains at a much higher level than in the previous period, suggesting a

permanent increase in media attention to urban policy issues. The break point also is

earlier than the transfer from the Times Digital Archive and Lexis-Nexis, just to

ensure that it is not the transfer between online systems that might explain the break

in the data.

Is the data punctuated or not? We can use some of the tests suggested by Jones et al

(2003) to find out (also see True 1999). Jones suggests that punctuations may be

found by mapping the distributions of per cent changes around the median point. If

the distribution is normal, then the decision-making structure is incremental,

characterised by a random distribution of changes; if there is punctuations, then it

should be leptokurtic – that is have many distributions close to the median point, with

also an above average at extreme points to mark the punctuations. Figure 2 plots the

distribution of bands of 5 per cent changes (e.g. –5=-5 to –10 per cent changes, 0 = 0

to –5 percent, 5=0 to 5 per cent, etc), which looks non-normal from visual inspection,

17

with a gradual growth in the reporting of the term during the period as indicated by

the positive mean change.

Figure 2: plots of 5 per cent change bands of changes of ‘inner city’ as reported

in The Times

bands of 5 per cent changes in inner city - The Times

800.0750.0

700.0650.0

600.0550.0

500.0450.0

400.0350.0

300.0250.0

200.0150.0

100.050.0

0.0-50.0-100.0

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Std. Dev = 92.26 Mean = 18.1

N = 267.00

Tests show the distribution is not normal. The Shapiro-Wilk statistic is .735 which

has a probability of zero; so too the Kolmogorov-Smirnov is .135 and also has a

probability of zero. The distribution has a high kurtosis of 22.1 (se=.297). One of

the problems with this kind of measure is that it is not good as establishing a step

change, which is our intuitive idea of a punctuation. Instead, following Jones et al

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1998, we can use dummy variables to represent the changes. In table 1 we report an

ARIMA (2,0,1) to estimate the effects of a series of dummy variables that seek to

capture the possible punctuations, so which derive from either the executive, partisan

impacts or have been generated by external shocks, though of course it is hard to

distinguish between these factors. It should be noted that, though it appears that the

inner city terms gradually trends upwards, a Dicky-Fuller test shows we can reject the

hypothesis that there is a unit root in this series (p=00).

The first test is whether there is a punctuation before and after the 1977 White Paper,

A Policy for the Inner Cities, which was the culmination of a process that started in

June of 1975 (Atkinson and Moon 1994: 65-6). This represented a major shift in

government policy, and did much to promote the term inner city in public discourse,

and it came from a major rethink about government policy, described by Atkinson and

Moon (1994: 64-86) as a ‘watershed’, which appears strongly in this model. The

second model tests the riots thesis, that July 1981 is the key date. The third tests

whether the 1987 with the election of a third term Conservative Government, keen to

promote a new approach to the inner cities in its Action for Cities document. This

was famously captured with pictures of the prime minister walking across an urban

wasteland in a photo-shoot just after the General Election. As with the others, model

3 appears as a plausible transfer point, but it also provides the most lift in attention

compared to the other dummy variables. The fourth tests for the partisanship with

Labour central government coded as 1 and Conservative as 0, with the counter

intuitive result that it is Conservative governments that lift attention to ‘inner city’.

Thus all four point s appear as punctuations, and not all can be used in the model

19

because of multicollinearity. So the next stage is to explore more how to model the

relevant punctuations.

20

Table 1: alternative specification of punctuations in the ‘inner city’ time series

Semi-robust standard errors in parentheses

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 1975 18.35* - - -

(3.69) Riot 81 - 26.26* - - (6.98) 1987 - - 30.45* - (10.66) Party - - - -9.32* (4.43) AR(2) .55* .512* .550* .620* (.142) (.163) (.151) (.139) MA(1) .69* .665* .625* .737* (.151) (.168) (.161) (.147) Constant 3.07 3.21 7.427 18.56 (2.36) (2.20) (2.51) (2.90) Log pseudo- likelihood -1295.9 -1281.0 -1280.8 -1300.5

N 346 346 346 346

The second source of media data is the reporting of riot itself in The Times during this

period (the coders have only reached a certain point) as shown in Figure 3.

21

Figure 3: Occurrence of riot in The Times

Date

Jul 1994

Jan 1993

Jul 1991

Jan 1990

Jul 1988

Jan 1987

Jul 1985

Jan 1984

Jul 1982

Jan 1981

Jul 1979

Jan 1978

Jul 1976

Jan 1975

Jul 1973

Jan 1972

Jul 1970

Jan 1969

Jul 1967

Jan 1966

Incl

uded

arti

cles

for r

iot

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

The riot figure shows the attention to riots in the newspapers, which shows an

extensive area of attention over the period, with a step change in 1978, and a massive

attention increase in 1980 (the first set of riots in Brisol, the precursor to the more

violent episode in Brixton the following year), and then in 1981, with another rise in

interest in 1985. The coders have not got beyond January 1987, but it looks like

there is another increase in interest. Looking at the series as a whole, it looks like

there is a break in the series before and after 1981, suggesting that the 1981 riots may

have punctuated the agenda of British politics.

22

A plausible hypothesis is that attention to riot generates attention to inner city. Table

2 tests this hypothesis.

Table 2: different specifications of the attention to inner city through media

attention to riot in The Times

Model 1 Model 2

Riot .6423* - (.0750) Riot(t-1) - .118 (.255) AR(2) .501* .523* (.129) (.116) MA(1) .611* .482* (.161) (.324) Constant 5.66 7.88* (1.17) (1.912) Log pseudo- -785.4 -874.4 Likelihood N 252 252

There appears to be a strong link from current reporting of riot to inner city, but not

lagged effect, and this finding also applies to longer lag specification of riot. There

does not appear evidence that riot reporting feeds in a time-lagged sense into

reporting of inner city. But data the display a high degree of volatility at one end of

the series but not at the other. Tests on an OLS regression of both model 1 and

model 2 suggest autoregressive conditional heteroscedascity (p=0.00 and .0003

respectively). This cautions for careful treatment in time-series models, such as the

application of the ARCH family of models. Indeed a GARCH (1,1) specification

shows the both the lagged and the simultaneous terms to be significant in both cases

(see output in the appendix).

23

Public Opinion

Public opinion exists for a number of relevant dimensions for urban policy. Housing

is one obvious dimension, which is represented in the figure 2.

Figure 3: housing as the most urgent problem.

Date

Jan 1985

Jan 1984

Jan 1983

Jan 1982

Jan 1981

Jan 1980

Jan 1979

Jan 1978

Jan 1977

Jan 1976

Jan 1975

Jan 1974

Jan 1973

Jan 1972

Jan 1971

Jan 1970

Jan 1969

Jan 1968

Jan 1967

Jan 1966

Hou

sing

as

mos

t urg

ent p

robl

em

20

10

0

It seems that housing started being an important problem but then dropped to a few

percentage points – in any case it is hard to imagine the population thinking that

housing should be that important, though it is interesting to think why the general

public became so interested in it in the early 1970s.

24

Another obvious topic is unemployment, which has affected the inner cities more than

elsewhere. The data is shown in figure 4, which shows its gradual rise an issue as

unemployment increased in the 1980s. The dip may be connected to the riots in 1981

as the public may have shifted its attention.

Figure 4: unemployment as the most urgent problem.

Date

Jan 1985

Jan 1984

Jan 1983

Jan 1982

Jan 1981

Jan 1980

Jan 1979

Jan 1978

Jan 1977

Jan 1976

Jan 1975

Jan 1974

Jan 1973

Jan 1972

Jan 1971

Jan 1970

Jan 1969

Jan 1968

Jan 1967

Jan 1966

Une

mpl

oym

ent a

s m

ost u

rgen

t pro

blem

100

80

60

40

20

0

Turning to law and order, we can see this as an alternative response to political

violence as well as an urban policy, and this is shown in figure 5.

25

Figure 5: law and order the most urgent problem

Date

Jan 1985

Jan 1984

Jan 1983

Jan 1982

Jan 1981

Jan 1980

Jan 1979

Jan 1978

Jan 1977

Jan 1976

Jan 1975

Jan 1974

Jan 1973

Jan 1972

Jan 1971

Jan 1970

Jan 1969

Jan 1968

Jan 1967

Jan 1966

Law

and

ord

er a

s m

ost u

rgen

t pro

blem

12

10

8

6

4

2

0

Law and order shows bursts of activity in the late 1970s, with a larger burst in 1981,

again which may be linked to the riots, which dies away again later on.

The other surprise is the extent to which public attention to immigration does not

grow as the most important problem during our period, which is shown in figure 6.

Here the figures show a rise in public attention at the beginning of the 1970s, that then

dies away, to be followed by a rise in concern over the 1980s.

26

Figure 6: immigration the most urgent problem

:

Date

Jan 1985

Jan 1984

Jan 1983

Jan 1982

Jan 1981

Jan 1980

Jan 1979

Jan 1978

Jan 1977

Jan 1976

Jan 1975

Jan 1974

Jan 1973

Jan 1972

Jan 1971

Jan 1970

Jan 1969

Jan 1968

Jan 1967

Jan 1966

Imm

igra

tion

as m

ost u

rgen

t pro

blem

30

20

10

0

Is this data macropunctuated? The answer to that question is that it is partially.

Unemployment clearly is, with a massive increase in the early 1980s, with no

subsidence. Housing shows a move from high to low importance. Law and order

is, but rather less so, along with immigration.

It is useful to see whether a major shift in attention to the inner cities in the media is

linked to public opinion. Here we are uncertain about the direction of causality so a

vector autoregression model (VAR) model is appropriate where a lag of two is

27

specified. The results are shown in table 3, which shows that public opinion affects

media coverage and not vice versa, a finding that is consistent with the literature on

media effects. Analysis of the opinion variables ‘law and order’ and ‘immigration’

do not show a relationship, indicating the public perceptions of unemployment is the

main driver of public opinion and that the media interest does not drive public

attention either.

Table 3: a VAR model of ‘inner city’ and opinion on unemployment (2 lags) Dependent Independent ‘Inner City’ ‘Inner City’→ .505* (.075) Unemployment→ .101* (.027)

Constant 1.864 (1.20) Unemployment ‘Inner city’ -.002 (.069) Unemployment→ .971* (.025) Constant 1.762 (1.115) N=163, r-sq for ‘inner city’=.38, for unemployment=.92

28

Final models

To find out the possible origins of punctuations, it is possible to put together the

variables in a series of final models. We first assume that the changes in public

concern about unemployment, lagged by one month, affect changes in media

attention. Then we seek to add a series of dummy variables to see if there is

additional explanatory power from some of the dummy variables.

Table 4: final models predicting ‘inner city’

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Unemploymentt-1 .136* -.014 .221* .173* (.055) (.198) (.048) (.053) 1975 5.73* - - 4.36* (1.843) (1.70) Riot81 - 18.03 - - (27.01) Party - - 4.80* 3.30* (1.81) (1.65) AR(2) .384* .537* .383* .372* (.117) (.317) (.119) (.119) MA(1) .358* .418 .358* .352* (.115) (.207) (.114) (.114) Constant .981 4.81 .238 -.554 (.966) (1.80) (1.25) (1.13) Log pseudo-likelihood -607.1 -603.0 -607.3 -606.5 N 173 173 173 173

Model 1 shows that the 1975 dummy still retains its power when controlling for

public interest; model 2 does not work at all largely because of high collinearity

between lagged media attention to unemployment and the riot dummy variable. From

29

this analysis, it is not possible to adjudicate whether it is riots or media concern with

unemployment that is the factor affecting media attention to ‘inner city’, though in a

separate regression with each one as a separate independent variable, riot has a higher

t-value (3.76) than public opinion (3.54). We could not model the 1987 dummy

because the public opinion data only goes up to 1987 at this stage of data collection.

Model 3 shows party to have the hypothesised sign, with Labour promoting more

attention to inner city, which shows its impact when controlling for public opinion.

Model 4 integrates the most plausible independent terms into a satisfactory model of

public opinion, the 1975 dummy and party control.

Conclusions

This paper is preliminary because of the unfinished state of data collection, so it is not

possible to make the links to final policy outputs. There are also gaps in cases for

public opinion, which means that different parts of the analysis have different

numbers of cases. There are also modelling issues to resolve about the exact form of

time regression analysis. Nonetheless, the analysis has made some progress in

seeking to uncover the origins of punctuations through exploring the attention of the

media to a critical policy issue of the ‘inner city’. We show that such attention is

punctuated, just as Baumgartner and Jones predict. Such is the nature of public

issues. We also show that certain dates are important in shifting media attention. The

1975 policy change appears to have shifted public interest. At first it seemed that the

riots also shifted public interest as Piven and Cloward hypothesised. But in fact

lagged media attention to riots does not predict media attention; nor does a dummy

30

variable reflecting the key riot date affect it either once the control of public opinion

on unemployment had been controlled for. What predicts media attention is lagged

attention in public opinion, as well as policy initiation as indicated by the 1975 policy

change. Finally, we note that parties have an impact as the traditional literature

indicates.

Much remains for future research. Public spending data will allow the adjudication

between outputs, the media and public attention. More data points will become

available as the coders progress. Fuller VAR models should be able to capture the

causal effects in a fuller way that has been achieved in the current paper. Finally, it

will be possible to account for the punctuations in a more nuanced way through

modelling step and pulse changes as in a dynamic time-series model.

31

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Appendix: GARCH estimations of key models

Table 2: attention to inner city through media attention to riot in The Times

OPG standard errors in parentheses Model 1 Model 2

Riot .393* - (.012) Riot(t-1) - .099* (.011) Constant .427 1.168 (.775) (.465) AR(2) .868* .799* (.055) (.033) MA(1) .950* .920* (.022) (.015) ARCH (1) .915* 2.17* (.137) (.199) GARCH (1) .549* .321* (.030) (.030) Constant .021 .011 (.013) (.031) Log - Likelihood -624.5 -636.4 N 240 239

39

Table 4: final model predicting ‘inner city’

OPG standard errors in parentheses Model 4 Unemploymentt-1 .081*

(.030) 1975 -2.02 (1.93) Party 5.98* (1.59) Constant .839 (1.072) AR(2) .546* (.046) MA(1) .830* (.027) ARCH(1) 3.11* (.408) GARCH(1) .029* (.024) Constant 4.76

(1.99) Log likelihood = -576.3336 N 173

40