By bringing together political economy, behavioural research and policy studies, Banklash studies the mutual feedback loops linking post-crisis regulation, public opinion, and the media coverage that mediates between citizens and governments in all democracies.
Project overview
The name Banklash refers to the public outrage that the bank bailouts provoked during the financial crisis of 2007 and how that anger affects perceptions of fairness and feeds anti-elite populism.
With a focus on USA, UK, Germany, France, Switzerland and Australia, Banklash has:
- Collected the first cross-nationally comparable database on public attitudes towards finance, inequality, bankers’ pay, etc. It also assessed how different media ‘frames’ generate different responses/preferences in public opinion;
- Analysed, through supervised machine learning, the dominant media ‘frames’ regarding the coverage of banking sector regulation; and
- Examined the dynamics of policymaking and policy responsiveness within bank regulation. It linked episodes of policy intervention to the datasets on public opinion and attitudes, and to the analysis of the predominant media ‘frames’.
