Over-Responsibilised and over-Blamed: Elected Actors in Media Reporting on Governance Networks. a Comparative Analysis in Eight European Metropolitan Areas

This paper contributes to the study of democratic problems related to governance networks, by focusing on the role of the media. Two rivalling hypotheses are examined. The functionalist hypothesis postulates that the media accurately inform the public about policy actors and their responsibilities. The media-bias hypothesis postulates an attention bias towards elected policy actors, resulting in reduced public visibility of non-elected policy actors in new forms of governance. The analysis uses standardised data on decision-making processes and newspaper content relating to public transport and economic promotion policies in eight Western European metropolitan areas. Findings are that the actor mix of governance networks is quite accurately reflected in newspaper reporting. However, elected actors are more often presented as responsible for policies ('over-responsibilised'), and they are more often blamed for policy failures than other actors ('over-blamed'). We show that this pattern is not linked to the wider institutional set-up of the cases under scrutiny, but linked to different types of media systems found therein.