Political Agenda Setting as Mediatized Politics? Media–Politics Interactions from a Party and Issue Competition Perspective

Abstract

The paper puts forward, and empirically explores, claims on how the literature on political agenda setting could inform the concept of mediatized politics. It uses as a starting point the lack of empirical research within mediatization studies, arguing that the field of political agenda setting offers important supplements through systematic investigations of the media’s role in promoting social problems on the political agenda. However, this does not imply a straightforward merging of the two traditions. Instead, I discuss how agenda-setting perspectives offer a more active and visible role for political actors and political logics in the media–politics relationship, presenting analyses that find media influence on political issue attention to be conditioned by policy responsibility and the competition between opposition and government. Furthermore, the paper takes issue with the zero-sum game interpretation of the media–politics relationship, where mediatization necessarily implies decreasing political influence. Future research, on both mediatization and agenda setting, need to address how the media (re)distributes power between different actors or institutions in politics. As a first step toward this goal, I show that opposition parties (in some respects) are more mediatized than government but that this constitutes an opposition strength in party competition.