Explaining policy change: the impact of the media, public opinion and political violence on urban budgets in England

This paper seeks to explain national government allocations of urban budgets in England, which changed dramatically over the 1966 to 2003 period. The paper sets out three perspectives on major policy change: partisan shifts, external shocks, and media-agenda punctuations, which link respectively to the literatures on the policy-opinion link, the impact of political violence on welfare policy outputs, and on the media and agenda-setting. After discussing descriptive statistics, the analysis uses a time series regression model to explain budget change, with media attention to urban issues, public opinion on economic issues, unemployment, partisan control, and measures of urban riots as the explanatory terms. The paper finds that the media agenda and the key riot year of 1981 are the best explanations of budget levels.