Do Political Parties and the Press Influence the Public Agenda?

Abstract

Mass media are considered to play an important role in influencing the perception of issues in political campaigns in terms of the way they are covered and the relative prominence they are given. Agenda setting has become the standard term for this process. The influence of political parties and public opinion on how the media and the press select issues and determine their relative prominence has received less attention and, so far, research conducted on this aspect of agenda setting has not yielded consistent results. Summaries of the agenda-setting literature and content analysis methods are presented. The empirical study examines the relationships between the national press, the public and the three mainstream political parties in the 2001 UK General Election Campaign, building on a study of press coverage of the 1997 UK General Election and subsequent work. The findings of a content analysis of all news articles that appeared in six national daily newspapers during the UK General Election 2001 campaign, with distinctions made between front page and inside coverage, editorial and straight news reporting, are presented. The relative incidence of issues is identified. A similar content analysis of press releases issued by the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties during the campaign period is carried out. Press releases are used by political parties to get messages into the press agenda and into the public domain. They are a useful source to trace the evolution of the political campaign agenda, as identified by the parties. The press releases are analysed using the same issue categories identified for the press. The results are compared and contrasted with data from two opinion polls conducted at the start and at the end of the campaign. The evidence is used to help establish the role that agenda setting played in the UK General Election Campaign 2001. The differences and relationships between the three agenda groups are shown. The results suggest that public opinion had an impact on those issues selected for priority by the political parties. Public opinion changed little throughout the campaign. There was no significant shift in how the public rated issues between the start and the end of the campaign. In this case the agenda-setting impact of the press on the public, in the short term, appears to have been limited, as was the impact of the parties and public opinion on press coverage. The extent to which these results are a consequence of the specific characteristics of this election is discussed.