A well-informed public will support spending on dams, sewers and other basic infrastructure and hold representatives accountable for neglect, finds a new study, revealing a link between strong local journalism and climate resilient communities.

Published in the journal Political Behaviour, the study out of the University of California, Los Angeles finds that even a few paragraphs of local context will increase public support for preventive infrastructure spending compared to a brief news bulletin. The information-rich content also leads people to impose accountability penalties on local leaders who fail to invest in prevention.

“Empty newsrooms and AI reporting don’t provide communities with the information they need to make investments for their own health and security,” study co-author Megan Mullin, a UCLA political scientist focused on environmental politics, said in a release. Mullin’s work, in partnership with Andrew Trexler of Duke University in North Carolina, builds on research that explored how the hollowing out of local newsrooms undermines political accountability and policy performance in the United States.

“Local journalism in the U.S. is enduring a long period of decline,” they write. The circulation of daily media has dropped nearly 60% in the last three decades and thousands of newspapers have vanished, “especially in poorer communities.” The remainder have seen their work forces slashed, while a movement toward larger ownership structures has “centralized news production ex-locally, separating coverage from well-defined community or place.”

In step, coverage of local issues and politics has fallen by around 70% in small market newspapers and 60% in larger ones, they add. This decline stands to imperil public safety as quality reportage on the costs and benefits of local infrastructure investment is lost.

“Infrastructure vulnerabilities are often invisible; news coverage can bring vulnerabilities to light and communicate their significance for public health and safety,” the researchers say. “By helping people discover, gather, compare, contextualize, and share information, local journalism enables communities to coordinate around shared interests and hold public officials accountable for their actions.”

Municipal Vote in an Imaginary City

To test their core research question—“whether information-rich news coverage of local infrastructure issues affects public preferences and voting behaviour”—the authors conducted a survey experiment with a demographically representative group of 3,310 adults.

Participants were randomly assigned one of eight vignettes to read, each of them a mock news story sourced from the fictitious Franklin Gazette, the local newspaper in an equally fictitious U.S. city of roughly 200,000 people.

Styled to look like a real news article, each vignette described an upcoming mayoral election, “as well as voting on a proposed municipal bond that would pay for public improvements to an aging infrastructure system.”

All the vignettes mentioned that the bond would be funded by a property tax increase expected to cost the average homeowner $40 per year, and offered quotes from the incumbent mayor, who opposed the bond, and a challenger candidate, who supported it.

Depending on which vignette they received, survey participants read about one of two infrastructure concerns: either an aging dam at risk of a single catastrophic failure, or an aging sewer system, meaning risk of an “ongoing nuisance issue.” In each of these categories, the vignettes appeared to the reader in one of four reporting “conditions” with the first (the control) mimicking “a brief news bulletin that a resource-starved editor could assemble with only a few minutes of work.”

Under the second condition, the research team “added investigative reporting about the incumbent city leader’s neglect of the infrastructure system in question,” while the third gave readers “event-oriented contextual information” about a recent failure, connecting it to ongoing concerns about the condition of that infrastructure.

The fourth condition included both investigative and event-oriented reporting, to understand “the interactive effect of exposure to both types of information richness.”

‘Information Richness’ Means Knowledgeable Voters

The UCLA team set out to test the assumption that cities under-invest in infrastructure because voters are “myopic or otherwise non-rational” about their own long-term interest. The study found that voters are more likely to support infrastructure investments if they know more about risks and responsibility—and that conclusion held true across party lines.

“Critically, these salutary effects of news coverage persisted across the partisan divide,” say the researchers. While Republican readers of the conventional news article were “more skeptical” of spending than Democrat readers of the same article, conservatives ultimately demanded more investment and accountability than liberals when they had detailed information about infrastructure neglect.

Notably, resource-intensive investigative news and less costly contextual reporting were equally effective in strengthening public support for infrastructure spending and demands for accountability. Both are becoming crucial as the climate crisis deepens, the researchers say.

“Local news reporting builds public support for infrastructure investments,” Mullin said. “Heat, floods, drought, and fire are putting new stress on aging and deteriorating infrastructure, which must be maintained to protect communities against these growing climate risks.”

And “our study shows that investing in facilities that improve our resilience to climate hazards requires investing in the health of local news.”