Karine Van Der Straeten

In this article, we study whether media content influences legislators. We use the emergence of big tech companies and their regulation as a case study. We collect a large corpus of speeches about the tech industry delivered in the British Parliament over the past twenty years, as well as articles about tech giants published in five major British newspapers. Using NLP methods, we construct monthly time series tracing changes in media content and political discourse on the regulation of digital companies. Using Granger-causality tests, we find that media content has an independent predictive impact on politicians. We interpret these findings with a structural model in which media provide valuable information to both voters and politicians: they inform voters about where the politicians stand on the issue, and they inform politicians about voters' preferences on this same issue.