An interesting story from Pepper Culpepper’s (very good) “new book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521134137?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0521134137 on business’s political power in France, Germany, Japan and Holland. Culpepper argues that one of the ways in which the press influences politics is by providing politicians with some means to infer the salience of different political issues.
bq. Alexander Dyck and his colleagues provide a telling example of the impact of changing press coverage on the political influence of business in their study of votes in the U.S. Senate on the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Seventeenth Amendment called for direct election of senators, rather than their appointment by state governments, and it was seen at the time as a way to limit the influence of big business on the Senate. The amendment failed in the Senate in 1902 but passed in 1911.
bq. Dyck et al. analyze the two roll call votes on it, looking in particular at how the votes of individual senators changed after the publication of a series of sensationalist articles in the muckraking magazine _Cosmopolitan_ in 1906, entitled “The Treason of the Senate.” As voters became informed about the issue of corruption and its connection to the direct election of senators – and as politicians became aware of the importance of the issue to the voting public – the ability of big business to get the vote it wanted from individual senators decreased. (p.7)
The Dyck et al. article (paywalled) is “here”:http://www.nber.org/papers/w14360.pdf – it has a more libertarian spin than Culpepper’s exegesis (but this seems more a matter of terminology than anything more significant). They find that
bq. One standard deviation increase in the diffusion of Cosmopolitan increases the probability that the same senator switched from a “no” vote to a “yes” vote by 31 percentage points.
It’s amusing to think of _Cosmopolitan_ as a muckraking magazine. But it would be interesting to trace back the origins of the current push towards (mild) reform of the filibuster process, to see what role media played. My rough sense is that that the media (including especially new media) played a significant role in getting filibuster reform on the political agenda – but this may of course be as much a result of my particular reading predilections as of empirical reality.