Lost: watchdog - accountability through local and regional newspapers

Abstract

The Dutch decentralization in the social domain has given more tasks and autonomy to the local government. This necessitates proper accountability processes for two reasons. First of all, to check if policy turns out to be effective and to see if governmental actors appear to misbehave in some way. And secondly, to assure that citizens are sufficiently informed about what their municipality is doing concerning these very sensitive and influential topics in the social domain (in line with Arnold, 2006).

Local and regional media are ideally present to trigger, report and assure formal and informal accountability processes, and work as an accountability forum in itself (in line with Jacobs & Schillemans, 2016). However, the deterioration of regional and local journalism (Kik & Landman, 2013) raises the question if local and regional media are able to fulfill accountability tasks on a municipal level concerning the decentralization in the social domain.

In this research we have used a mixed methods approach to get a complete overview of the workings of local and regional media in relation to the municipality’s new tasks in the social domain. We have examined: - The amount of news articles written by local, regional and national newspapers regarding the new tasks in the social domain; - Differences between municipalities: the influence of size and region on the quantity and quality of the news articles; - The quality of the local and regional news articles for accountability purposes; - The concrete roles of local and regional news media in (formal) accountability processes;

The outcomes of this research show that local and regional newspapers have a complicated relation to fulfilling their accountability tasks on a local level. On the one hand, their role has increased since the decentralization and most municipalities can consume a range of different news outlets and news formats. On the other hand, we believe the role of local and regional media is not steady enough to rely on as an accountability mechanism. And, we doubt that the quality of the articles is sufficient to make an actual impact on formal or public accountability processes. We conclude that the local media watchdog is missing.