When Politics Stifles Policy. A Research on Italian Newspapers

When Politics Stifles Policy A Research on Italian Newspapers Luigi Bobbio University of Turin We know that the news about politics enjoy a wide coverage by the media. But what about policies? Can a citizen who wants to be informed about the measures that are under discussion, adopted or implemented, or about their outcomes realize which issues are at stake and which solutions are under scrutiny? How do the media contribute to the public deliberation on problems and solutions? This type of information is a key feature for both the quality of the policies themselves, and for the quality of democracy. Yet the issue of policy communication by the media has been so far neglected by both communication and policy studies. While the studies on the relationship between media and politics fill hundreds of libraries’ shelves, those on the relationship between media and public policy can be counted on your fingers. One of the few studies devoted to this topic begins complaining that "existing literature on the relationship between the media and public policy is patchy and provides a rather incoherent picture" (Koch-Baumgarten and Voltmer 2010, 2). The few studies on the matter are mainly addressed to assess the influence that the media exert on policymaking (Dearing and Rogers 1996, Koch-Baumgarten and Voltmer 2010, Soroka et al. 2013) and they come to rather inconsistent results as they reveal “a puzzling mixture of cases where the media had a strong impact on the process and/or outcome of policy and ones where they did not play any role” (Koch-Baumgarter and Voltmer 2010, 4). But when we face the problem of the relationship between media and policy, we can ask another question, somewhat preliminary and perhaps more important, i.e. whether and to what extent the media are able to inform the public on the reasons why policies are adopted, on the disputes that surround them, on the causal hypotheses on which they are based, on the effects that they produce. In this case the problem is to understand whether the media are able to contribute to the public debate on the governmental choices, according to the growing literature on the “mediated deliberation” (Ettema 2007, Wessler 2008, Augoustinos et al. 2010, Maia 2012). 2 This is the fundamental research question that we1 addressed to Italian daily newspapers. We chose to analyse these traditional media even if we know that most information on policy comes to citizens through other channels (TV and the Internet), because in this pioneer research we preferred to move in a well-known land. We wanted to understand how public policies were presented to the readers and how Italian press was contributing to the public debate on governmental choices. We pursued this general goal through two research strategies with different degrees of amplitude and different levels of detail. The first strategy (wider, but less deep) consisted in comparing the coverage of public policies by Italian newspapers with that of other two countries. The second research strategy (less wide but deeper) consisted in studying the treatment of three public policies by Italian newspapers. Comparing three countries The first part of the research was devoted to the comparison of Italian newspaper with those of two other countries. We chose France and Spain because we can suppose they have much in common with the Italian media system, as they all belong – according to Hallin and Mancini (2004) – to the Mediterranean model of journalism. For each country five daily newspapers were selected. We considered all the articles about policies that had been published in the national pages during one month in 2012 and during the same month in 2013. Overall we gathered 3678 articles, that were coded on the basis of a unique codebook (table 1). TABLE 1 – Number of articles about policies selected for comparative analysis for each country and newspaper 2012 2013 Total Il Sole 24 Ore 395 145 540 Corriere della Sera 175 36 211 La Repubblica 145 23 168 Italy La Stampa 116 25 141 Il Giornale 78 6 84 Total 909 235 1144 Le Figaro 242 292 534 France Les Échos 174 288 462 1 The research was funded by the Compagnia di San Paolo in coordination with the University of Turin, and was done by a team headed by Franca Roncarolo and made up by Marinella Belluati, Luigi Bobbio, Tiziana Caponio, Enrico Gargiulo, Micol Maggiolini, Fedra Negri, Gianfranco Pomatto, Stefania Ravazzi and Antonella Seddone. A broader description of the research and its results can be found in Bobbio and Roncarolo (2015). 3 Spain Le Monde Libération Ouest-France Total El País El Periódico El Mundo La Vanguardia ABC Total Total 2012 125 118 42 701 128 90 104 77 65 464 2074 2013 167 104 112 963 97 91 76 77 65 406 1604 Total 292 222 154 1664 225 181 180 154 130 870 3678 We can shortly resume the main results of this comparison on three aspects: attention, actors, and argumentation: - attention: Spanish and Italian newspapers (with the exception of Il Sole 24 ore) devote less attention to policies than the French ones and hence they are likely to give more attention to politics (figure 1); FIGURE 1 – Percentage of policy articles over the total number of articles published in the national pages of each newspaper (average data 2012-2013). - actors: Italian newspapers mention less local and regional governments, less European institutions, and less experts, and hence they devote more attention to national level politicians (figure 2); 4 FIGURE 2 – Percentage of policy articles that mention sub-national governments, European institutions and experts (average data 2012-2013). - argumentation: Italian (and Spanish) newspapers present less arguments in favour or against the policy under discussion and hence they often tend to neglect the merit of the policy (figure 3). FIGURE 3 – Percentage of policy articles that include at least one argument (average data 2012-2013). The bad scores of Italian newspapers, that were revealed by the comparison with Spain and especially with France, have something to do with the close link between the Italian press and politics: Italian newspapers give less room to policies (and therefore presumably more room to politics) and when they talk about policies they heavily rely on the voice of politicians of national rank, rather than of stakeholders, experts, supra- or sub-national actors. The lack of argumentation, compared with France, shows that Italian 5 (and Spanish) newspapers are less prone to explain the pros and the cons of the policy choices. The weak interest of Italian press on policies derives from what we can call a “politicist” attitude. By this unusual term, politicism, we mean the attitude to give an overwhelming importance to politics – the political parties, the coalitions, the construction and the crisis of political equilibria, the friend-enemy relations – and to see the whole word through the lens of politics. In this conception policies do not enjoy an autonomous status: they are deemed to be a by-product of politics that must be analyzed as part of the political game. Just an example: on April 1st 2015 the Italian Senate approved the long-awaited anticorruption law; the news was reported by one of the most important national newspapers (La Stampa) with a comment in the first page (under the title “Il dopo-Patto del Nazareno è cominciato”) that considered the impact of this decision not on corruption, but on the ongoing political game. This is a typical politicist attitude that we frequently find in Italian media. Politicism is different from politicization. The latter is a well-known concept in media studies: it means that there is a parallelism between the political system and the media system (Seymour-Ure 1974, Hallin and Mancini 2004). “Politicized” media tend to have a partisan attitude: they do not just inform, they take part in the game. The former – politicism – means that the media, even if not partisan or politicized, are culturally subjected to the world of politics. We can then say that in Italian newspaper politics tends to stifle policy, because policies are seen more as part of the political game, than as a remedy to public problems. Comparing three policies The second part of the research analyzed how Italian newspapers deal with three contentious public policies. We chose three policies that had had broad resonance in pub- 6 lic opinion in the last two decades, and that belonged to different policy fields: a public policy that is primarily concerned with the economy (Labor market regulation), a policy concerning immigration and the rights of foreigners (Citizenship to foreigners) and a policy concerning energy and environment (Incentives to photovoltaics). Figure 4 shows the number of articles published by the two most important Italian daily newspapers on the three policies in the last two decades. For each policy we chose about 150 articles that had been published in the periods of higher attention to the topic (that correspond to the main peaks in the graphic). FIGURE 4 - Number of articles published per year in Corriere della sera and la Repubblica on the three policies. The analysis of these 450 articles confirmed the aspects that had emerged from the comparison with France and Spain (in particular the politicism of Italian newspapers), but also showed - and this is the point that concerns us here – significant differences in the way the media deal with the three policies, in particular on three aspects: policy content, actors, arguments. Content. The articles do not always concern the policy content (the nature of the problem, the proposed or adopted measures, their likely effects). As a consequence of the politicism the Italian newspapers, the articles often dwell on how policies are intertwined with the political game: the positioning of the parties, the formation of any unusual alliances, political friendships or enmities that are generated around those issues, the possible cracking or the possible strengthening of the ongoing political balance. They use the policies to talk about politics. This phenomenon does not occur, however, in the same way for the three policies. Articles with predominant politics content are almost half of those dedicated to citizenship to foreigners and about one third of those about the labor market. They represent, however, a marginal share in the case of incentives for 7 photovoltaics (figure 5). The typical politicism of Italian press is therefore more evident in some than in other policies. * Multiple variable: there can be multiple actors per article. ** Percentage of articles in which there is at least one simple argument or at least one complete inference argument. FIGURE 5 - Features of the three policies (percentages over total articles on each policy). Actors. If we consider how often different types of actors are mentioned in the articles, we find out three different combinations. The news on labor market regulation mention nearly equally political actors and stakeholders, given the important role of the unions on this issue. News on citizenship to foreigners are mostly conveyed by politicians (given the weakness of the interest groups in this field). On the contrary the stakeholders are the most mentioned actor in the news on photovoltaics where politicians keep a marginal role (figure 5). Arguments. To analyze the use of arguments in the policy articles, we distinguished, according to Steiner et al. (2004), between arguments based on complete inference (e.g. when the links between cause and effect are explicitly recalled) and simple arguments (e.g. when this link is not overtly expressed). On this ground the distinctive character of the articles on photovoltaics comes out again. In fact, they contain simple arguments more frequently than in the other two public policies and above all there is a very remarkable difference in regard to the complete inference arguments which appear in half of the articles on photovoltaics, while they are almost irrelevant in the other two policies (figure 5). 8 How can we explain these differences between the coverage of photovoltaic policy and that of the other two? Why does the former appear in the press as less tied with politics and why is it presented with a much broader use of arguments? The difference does not lie in their contentiousness: all the three policy are highly contentious and for this reason they enjoy a wide (though uneven) coverage by the media. Our explanation is that the difference lies in the nature of the conflict, i.e. whether or not conflicts have a political nature. A conflict has a political nature when it is based on a well known cleavage (e.g. left-right) that can be found also in other fields and thus the positions of the actors assume a more general meaning: both the labor market regulation policy and the citizenship to foreigners policy fall clearly in this group. The conflict is not political when the cleavages on which it is based are not easily recognizable and do not correspond to those that dominate the political game. The photovoltaic policy is of this kind: the incentives encourage the energy transition, but at the same time lead to additional costs for costumers, offer high (too high?) profits to the firms, encourage the consumption of agricultural land and tend to generate a negative impact on the landscape. So this is a complex and multifaceted issue in which different interests are at stake and different values. The conflict, which is sharp among the involved actors, it is not referable to a single well known cleavage. The point is that when the conflict has a political nature political actors have no incentive to justify their choices. They do not need to persuade, but rather to galvanize their followers. It suffices thay appeal to their own identity, their own history, and their own values to make everyone understand the reason for their position. The media tend give voice mainly to political actors and do not report the reasons that justify the actors’ positions, because they are taken for granted. Conversely when the conflict has no political character, the actors cannot appeal to recognizable values and identities. They are forced to explain at length the merits of their position. To win, they must first try to convince. In turn the media, being not able to frame this conflict with known and recognizable cleavages, have no other choice but to give space to the arguments put forward by the actors. The conclusion we can draw from the comparison between the three policies is that the political conflict tends to discourage the public deliberation in the media (and also elsewhere). When the conflict takes on an overtly political aspect, the positioning of 9 the actors in the conflict appears obvious, predictable, and deductible from their membership. They do not need to provide detailed justifications, nor the media are interested to know and to present them because the show of the conflict is all they need. Public deliberation on a policy can be developed if the policy is considered apart from the political game. Conclusion In Italian newspapers politics stifles policies. And it does it, according to the results from this research, through two distinct mechanisms. The first, which was highlighted by the comparison with the French newspapers (and, in part, with the Spanish ones), consists in the politicist attitude of the Italian press, i.e. the tendency to look at the public policy through the lens of those politicians who are engaged in defending or overthrowing the ongoing political balance. Italian media tend to consider public policy as an appendix - after all marginal - of the much more important political game. The second mechanism, which was highlighted by the comparison between the three policies, is that the political conflict tends to depress deliberation: when the tensions that arise around policy choices are related to broader political cleavages both policy makers and the media have a weak incentive to tackle the merit of the conflict and to provide justifications to the positions of the conflicting parties. The media seem to be hardly capable to systematically follow the development of public policies and the stakes around them. 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