This project will investigate how agenda-setting and agenda-building models offer ways of explaining and understanding an apparent paradigm shift in the dominant regulatory framework for developed financial markets. In the years following the global crisis of 2008, regulators pushed for much greater transparency in order to gain insight into market activity. Transparency in this regard concerns private firms now being required to report trillions of dollars’ worth of transactions, activity which previously was opaque to authorities. This focus, aimed at allowing regulators to identify emerging systemic risks, was resisted by much of the financial community and it marks an abrupt change from the laissez-faire approach that dominated regulatory activity for at least a quarter-century. In the context of agenda-building, is the post-crisis focus on transparency a case of the regulatory community successfully framing the crisis response debate in those terms, in the face of opposition from the financial community? Was the media enlisted in this effort after years of helping to frame the discussion in terms of growth and market efficiency? Or, can a case be made that media coverage influenced public opinion, which in turn emboldened or pushed the regulatory community to sharply change course? These questions are not mutually exclusive. From a radical perspective, it still bears asking whether a paradigm shift actually did take place and whether the regulatory community remains captured by special interests. Agenda-setting and agenda-building models, along with the concepts of framing and narratives, can allow us to investigate how media may have been involved in engineering such a paradigm shift. While public policy has long been fertile territory for illustrating agenda-setting and agenda-building processes, there has been a dearth of such research devoted specifically to financial regulation. Applying these methods to a relatively unexplored subject thus holds the possibility of broadening the theoretical literature of media effects studies and international political economy research. ______________________________________________ Adam has been a professional journalist for more than 25 years, much of that time as a senior editor for Reuters in London, Singapore and Stockholm. He has a Master of Arts in English Literature from Indiana University. Adam currently is a visiting lecturer in advanced financial journalism at City University. He also teaches for the Erasmus Mundus programme run jointly by City University and Aarhus University in Denmark and for a University of Oregon programme in London.
