Role of the Mass Media in Monitoring and Influencing the Performance of Social Welfare Schemes in India

Abstract: The mass media plays an important role in democratic societies to impose checks and balances on the functioning of various institutions of the state, and in shaping public opinion by informing people about the performance of these institutions. The agenda of the mass media can however be influenced by the government in power, especially if the media is dependent on the government for funding, or the government is powerful and can compromise the safety of media personnel. In this paper, we carefully examine the interactions between three factors: the performance in India of a social welfare scheme on rural employment guarantee (obtained from official records), the volume and sentiment of coverage of these factors in the mass media (obtained through an analysis of news articles of six English national newspapers), and the political alignment between the state governments in different states with the central government (obtained from election data). We construct a time series of these three datasets from 2014 to 2021, and show (a) how various performance factors of the welfare scheme are treated differently by the media in different states based on whether they are aligned or non-aligned with the Central government, and (b) whether coverage in the media is able to influence the performance of the welfare scheme. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to examine the interplay between media bias, government performance, and government influence, and helps uncover the complexities and nuances of these relationships.