Measuring Agenda Setting in Interactive Political Communication

Abstract

AbstractAlthough strategies exist to measure actors' efforts to set policy, media, and lawmaking agendas, political scientists lack a method for identifying and accurately measuring another form of agenda setting that lies under the surface anytime two people talk. Within interactions, such as debates, deliberations, and discussions, actors can set the agenda by shifting others' attention to their preferred topics. In this article, I use a topic model that locates where topic shifts occur within an interaction in order to measure the relative agenda‐setting power of actors. Validation exercises show that the model accurately identifies topic shifts and infers coherent topics. Three empirical applications also validate the agenda‐setting measure within different political settings: U.S. presidential debates, in‐person deliberations, and online discussions. These applications show that successfully setting the agenda can shape an interaction's outcomes, demonstrating the importance of continued research on this form of agenda setting.