Agenda Setters Research Articles

Mapping Europeanization in the Greek online public sphere: Assessing the Europeanizing dynamics of social media

For more than a decade, following the peak of the debt crisis, Greece has been facing multiple challenges. Amongthem, a pandemic (COVID-19) that brought the global and thus the Greek economy to a halt, an energy crisis that threatens to flatten entire social classes, a refugee crisis, and wider regional instability. All of these concurrent problems reflect crucial socio-economic transformations compounding the country’s unsustainable debt. Despite these adverse factors, in the present research the anti-European sentiments have almost entirely disappeared from the online public sphere. To examine the presence of Europe in the Greek online public discourse, a quantitative content analysis was conducted. The sample was based on 700 posts published on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube coming from mainstream media organisations’ accounts, individual users’ accounts, and public pages. According to the research findings, social media platforms function, to some extent, as alternative agenda setters, fostering the dissemination of topics, or the expression of viewpoints that are circumvented by the media organisations’ posts. Moreover, the online discussion regarding EU prospects and the European institutions’ policies are largely descriptive, devoid of any critical reflection or conflict. Therefore, Greece’s position in the EU looks like a one-dimensional issue, a feature that can be attributed to the fact that, in the Greek online public sphere, alternative voices and sources have a limited presence within the most viewed content of social media platforms.

“It’s All About US vs THEM!”: Comparing Chinese Populist Discourses on Weibo and Twitter

The recent resurgence of populism has led to renewed interest in the phenomenon, but it remains unclear how this phenomenon has manifested itself in non-Western settings like China. This article analyses Chinese populism and provides a systematic categorization of online discourses related to this phenomenon, including ideas about “the people,” “corrupt elites,” and “enemies.” The article is based on a collection of more than 100,000 Chinese online posts, collected from both Weibo and Twitter, that were classified as populist or not using natural language processing (NLP) models. We show how populism has manifested itself in Chinese online venues, and how populist discourses on Weibo and Twitter differ in topics, semantic content, and in who posts (agenda setters) and shares posts (audiences). The comparison demonstrates that different Chinese netizens take competing approaches to define the place of a rising China, and this also puts populism into the context of the peculiar Chinese way of rallying “the people” on behalf of the nation. Findings from this study contribute new insights into understanding populism in Chinese cyberspaces and provide a cross-platform perspective for understanding populist discourses in national and transnational contexts. The study also adds to computational methods in empirical research of populism in a comparative perspective.

Riding the COVID-19 Wave? Issue Attention during the Pandemic

Abstract The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic altered the political agendas and the existing agenda-setting processes of nations worldwide. While in times of crisis, incumbent parties cannot ignore problems and be purely strategic agenda setters, non-incumbent parties can be more selective and strategise the attention they devote to certain political issues. Based on an analysis of 1507 parliamentary questions posed by the parties in the multi-party parliament of Denmark before and during the first COVID-19 wave (March–June 2020), the present article aims at determining what explains issue emphasis during the crisis. During the first stages of the COVID-19 crisis, parties from both the right and the left of the political spectrum rather than emphasising only issues they ‘own’, devoted special attention to the most salient issues, including those connected to the pandemic. These findings have important implications for political responsiveness in times of crisis.

Coordination, agenda-setting, and future planning: the role of Combined Authorities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Following an intermittent and halting roll-out, Combined Authorities (CAs) are now an established part of English governance. They represent a ‘pooling’ of competences by different geographically contiguous local authorities which approximately align with economic geographies and have emerged with strong encouragement from central government. Today, they cover most of England’s large urban centres and enjoy a modest and variable range of permissions to act over planning, transport, and economic development. Since their establishment, they have grown in profile, owing in part to the presence of Directly Elected Mayors, who provide the model with executive leadership, visibility, and electoral legitimacy. The period of the Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to assess their role and influence and to explore how this changed during and as a result of this period of sustained national emergency. Drawing upon publicly available data related primarily – but not exclusively – to three CAs (West Midlands, Teesside, and Liverpool), we conclude that they have played three main overlapping roles. Firstly, they have proven to be engaged in coordination and mediation between regional stakeholders. Secondly, they have proved influential as agenda setters, drawing attention to central government failure. Thirdly, they have acted within their regeneration and planning competences to strategise the economic and urban futures of their city-regions.

Technology And Globalisation: How Social Media (Narrow Artificial Intelligence) Algorithms and Large Language Models by Internet Companies Have Replaced the Main Stream Media as Agenda Setters For the Global Culture

Technology And Globalisation: How Social Media (Narrow Artificial Intelligence) Algorithms and Large Language Models by Internet Companies Have Replaced the Main Stream Media as Agenda Setters For the Global Culture

Where Does the Indigenous Sámi News Come From? The Case of the Arctic Railway in Yle Sápmi

The Government of Finland launched Finland’s Arctic strategy in August 2013. The strategy included the Arctic Railway project, which since has become a focus of public debate. The Arctic Railway is planned to be constructed from the city of Rovaniemi in Finland to the city of Kirkenes in Norway. This study analyses the media coverage of the Arctic Railway project by Yle Sápmi, the Sámi unit of the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle (Yleisradio). The study investigates where the Indigenous Sámi news comes from, and which stakeholders, including but not limited to Sámi and non-Indigenous social actors, participate in the creation of the news surrounding the Arctic Railway project. The research builds on agenda-setting and agenda-building theories by posing the following question: who sets the agenda for the Sámi agenda setters (Auwal et al., 2020)? The goal of this research is to examine how, if in any way, the Sámi news media agenda could have been influenced by various sources of information and to what extent this media influence is transparent (Tsetsura & Kruckeberg, 2017).

Politics of Development in Bundelkhand Region of Northern India: Analysing Role of (Un)Civil Society

This study is an attempt to understand how development politics followed by the civil society organisations (CSOs) (with special reference to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in India can be analysed in view of the social character of such organisations. The findings of this study are based on field work conducted in the northern Indian region of Bundelkhand. Bundelkhand is an economically underdeveloped, poverty ridden and draught-prone region located in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP). The region suffers from deep-rooted social hierarchies and discrimination based on caste. Prevalence of such conditions of underdevelopment has also resulted in the emergence of vibrant CSOs in the region. However, the developmental agenda pursued by these organisations is largely confined to the questions of economic development including poverty alleviation, distribution of benefits of various state policies or raising concerns of depletion of natural resources especially of water scarcity. Larger structural questions of social justice, inclusion or participation of socially marginalised groups, especially of the scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST), have not received adequate attention in the agenda of most of these organisations. This study attempts to argue that what can explain this non-political nature of developmental agenda pursued by these CSOs is the social character of their leadership. A major reason behind the question of representation of social marginalised groups not being the core agenda of development is the continued dominance of social and economically dominant castes in managing these organisations. Though these groups do raise concerns of social equality and justice, it does not form the core agenda of development of the region. The state machinery or international aid agencies continue to work with the dominant sections as the agenda setters, while the representatives of marginalised communities continue to function at the margins of developmental agenda for the region.

An equity lens on behavioral science for conservation

AbstractIn recent decades, interest in and application of behavioral insights to conservation theory and practice have expanded significantly. Yet the growth of integrated strategies to adapt and guide human behavior in service of conservation outcomes has included limited engagement with questions of equity and power. Here we examine the use of behavioral approaches in conservation efforts, emphasizing potential misapplications that may result from omitting equity and power considerations. Such omission may lead to an overemphasis on the role of individual behaviors relative to system‐level drivers of biodiversity loss, result in misalignment between behavioral interventions and the actual drivers of behavior in situ, and incur unanticipated negative social welfare and distributional costs, all of which may undermine conservation success. We offer recommendations for centering equity when applying behavioral insights to conservation, including strategies for high‐level agenda setters (scholars, advocates, funders and programmatic leaders) as well as conservation practitioners. The urgent need for biodiversity conservation is insufficient reason to side‐step equity and power considerations; we contend that centering equity is consistent with this urgency and key for developing sustainable conservation theory and practice.

Towards a circular disruption: On the pivotal role of circular economy policy entrepreneurs

AbstractThe shift towards sustainable development is argued to be achieved by a circular disruption triggered or supported by circular economy (CE) policies. CE policies can pressure the disruption of currently predominant linear socio‐technical systems across sectors towards a circular paradigm. Knowledge on how these policies appear on the agenda is essential to accelerate the circular disruption. Several works highlight the importance of policy entrepreneurs as agenda setters. However, they were not explored by the scholarly community on CE yet. Therefore, this article analyses the characteristics and strategies of CE policy entrepreneurs in Portugal as a circular frontrunner in the European Union (EU). Two groups of policy entrepreneurs were distinguished based on their different characteristics and strategies. Successfully driving the adoption of national CE policies required ambitious, tenacious and perfectionist CE expert(s) who create a CE vision, derive concrete solutions and gather support for their ideas, the CE initiator. Influencing CE implementation and evaluation required politically savvy CE implementers who openly and tenaciously develop projects and secure the continuous development of the policy.

Sortition as Anti‐Corruption: Popular Oversight against Elite Capture

AbstractRandom selection for political office—or “sortition”—is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article argues that sortitioncancontribute to democratic renewal, but that its genuine promise is obscured by the excessive ambition and misplaced focus of prevailing models. Casting random selection as a route to accurate representation of the popular will, most contemporary proposals require randomly selected citizens to perform legislative tasks, whose open‐endedness grants substantial discretion to elite agenda setters and facilitators. The real democratic promise of sortition‐based reforms, I argue, lies in obstructing elite capture at critical junctures: a narrower task of oversight that creates fewer opportunities for elite manipulation. In such contexts, the benefits of empowering ordinary people—resulting from their immunity to certain distorting influences on career officials—plausibly outweigh the risks.

When Algorithms Recommend What’s New(s): New Dynamics of Decision-Making and Autonomy in Newsgathering

Newsroom innovation labs have been created over the last ten years to develop algorithmic news recommenders (ANR) that suggest and summarise what news is. Although these ANRs are still in an early stage and have not yet been implemented in the entire newsroom, they have the potential to change how newsworkers fulfil their daily decisions (gatekeeping) and autonomy in setting the agenda (agenda-setting). First, this study focuses on the new dynamics of the ANR and how it potentially influences the newsworkers’ role of gatekeeping within the newsgathering process. Second, this study investigates how the dynamics of an ANR could influence the autonomy of the newsworkers’ role as media agenda setters. In order to advance our understanding of the changing dynamics of gatekeeping and agenda-setting in the newsroom, this study conducts expert interviews with 16 members of newsroom innovation labs of<em> The Washington Post</em>,<em> The Wall Street Journal</em>, <em>Der Spiegel</em>, the BBC, and the Bayerische Rundfunk (BR) radio station. The results show that when newsworkers interact with ANRs, they rely on suggestions and summaries to evaluate what is newsworthy, especially when there is a “news peak” (elections, a worldwide pandemic, etc.). With regard to the agenda-setting role, the newsworker still has full autonomy, but the ANR creates a “positive acceleration effect” on how certain topics are put on the agenda.

From Complexity to Clarity

From Complexity to Clarity

Reconstructing the Informal and Invisible: Interactions Between Journalists and Political Sources in Two Countries

ABSTRACT A significant part of the interaction between journalists and their sources in political journalism is informal or not mentioned in the media content. Visibility/invisibility and formality/informality are tactical choices applied by journalists and sources. They influence agenda building in the short term and shared interpretations that dominate the public sphere in the long term. However, the extent to which informal and/or invisible sources participate, what their role is, and why have not been consistently measured. This paper offers a matrix model to map and compare the usage of formal/informal and visible/invisible interactions between journalists and their sources. The data consists of 475 journalist-source interactions in Lithuania and Sweden reconstructed by 33 political journalists. The results demonstrate how different interactions presuppose different source roles in the news process. Formal invisible sources act as gatekeepers, and informal invisible sources act as agenda setters.

Who Sets Social Media Sentiment?: Sentiment Contagion in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Media Tweet Network

ABSTRACT Sentiment contagion across the media tweet network of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including traditional and non-traditional journalistic outlets, was identified and analyzed using time-series analysis. Online non-partisan journalistic accounts reported the highest use of positive sentiment words, while political commentators reported the highest level of negative sentiment word use. Online partisan accounts, including @drudge_report, were identified as intermedia agenda setters that led negative sentiment contagion in multiple journalistic outlet categories. No evident individual agenda setter account was found in positive sentiment contagion. Implications for media influence researchers and journalistic actors were discussed.

The roles of news media as democratic fora, agenda setters, and strategic instruments in risk governance

This study analyzes news media’s role in governmental decision-making processes related to a gradually intensifying series of earthquakes resulting from gas drilling in the Netherlands, and catastrophic natural earthquakes in Italy. According to the risk governance actors interviewed in both cases, media play three roles, as: democratic fora, agenda setters, and strategic instruments. Media attention for risk can create ripple effects in governmental decision-making processes. However, media attention tends to be risk-event driven and focuses on direct newsworthy consequences of events. For ‘non-event risks’, or when newsworthiness after a risk-event fades, the media’s agenda setting and democratic fora roles are limited. This contributes to risk attenuation in society, potentially resulting in limited risk prevention and preparedness. Governmental actors report difficulties in using news media for strategic communication to facilitate risk governance because of media’s tendency towards sensationalism. Our research suggests that, in the governance of earthquake-risk news, media logic overrules other institutional logics only for a short while and not in the long run when the three roles of media do not reinforce each other.

Context Dependence in Speed Dating: An Empirical Test of Relative Thinking

Context influences decision making. However, evidence on the specific underlying mechanism is scarce. Since context dependence in decision making may impact consumers, firms and political agenda setters, exploring the precise mechanism through which choices are distorted is imperative. This paper provides evidence that expanding the utility range of one choice dimension leads decision makers to attach less weight to this attribute, in line with the notion of relative thinking. Context dependence is more pronounced if evaluators are female and survives extensive robustness checks. Implications for policy are discussed.

The unit of resilience: unbeckoned degrowth and the politics of (post)development in Peru and the Maldives

Abstract This article asks how people envision lives without economic growth in contexts where conventional development ceases to be feasible. It presents ethnographic research I conducted in Peru and in the Maldives, which policymakers see as two climate crisis frontiers. I argue for defining resilience as a grounded, necessarily local, actor's theory of permanence; it is a theory people from diverse social classes and institutions generate in situations of vulnerability and crisis. In the Andes' Colca Valley, which some residents predict has only several habitable decades left due to increasing water scarcity, sustainable development projects are attenuating their presence as their budgets shrink, while mining enterprises and their corporate social responsibility programs have emerged as development's new agenda setters. The Maldives is one of the world's lowest-lying nations, which rising seas could soon render uninhabitable. Between 2008 and 2012, President Mohamed Nasheed made addressing the climate crisis a policy priority by substituting conventional industrial development with a short-lived quest for national carbon neutrality. Examining this contrapuntal pair of frontier sites, I argue that defining the unit of resilience is a political act: forging this definition means prioritizing what, in a human-driven ecosystem, should remain permanent and what should be left behind. Keywords: resilience, degrowth, climate change, Peru, Maldives

Still an Agenda Setter: Traditional News Media and Public Opinion During the Transition From Low to High Choice Media Environments

This study analyzes whether the agenda-setting influence of traditional news media has become weaker over time—a key argument in the “new era of minimal effects” controversy. Based on media content and public opinion data collected in Sweden over a period of 23 years (1992–2014), we analyze both aggregate and individual-level agenda-setting effects on public opinion concerning 12 different political issues. Taken together, we find very little evidence that the traditional news media has become less influential as agenda setters. Rather, citizens appear as responsive to issue signals from the collective media agenda today as during the low-choice era. We discuss these findings in terms of cross-national differences in media systems and opportunity structures for selective exposure.

When Are Agenda Setters Valuable?

AbstractWhy do industries donate money to legislative campaigns when roll‐call votes suggest that donors gain nothing in return? I argue that corporate donors may shape policy outcomes by influencing powerful agenda setters in the early stages of lawmaking. On the basis of a new data set of more than 45,000 individual state legislator sessions (1988–2012), I document how agenda control is deemed valuable to legislators and groups seeking influence on policy. Employing a difference‐in‐differences design, I assess the revealed price, as measured by campaign contributions, that firms are willing to pay for access to committee and party leaders and document how this price varies across industries and institutions. The results indicate that industries systematically funnel money to the legislative agenda setters by whom they are regulated, and to those endowed with important procedural powers. I document that the value of agenda‐setter positions has increased dramatically in recent years. Finally, exploiting changes in state laws, I show that relaxing contribution limits significantly benefits committee chairs and party leaders more so than it does other legislators, suggesting that agenda setters have strong incentives to obstruct restrictive campaign finance reforms.

Dynamics of Policymaking: Stepping Back to Leap Forward, Stepping Forward to Keep Back

AbstractWe study dynamic policymaking when today's policy agreement becomes tomorrow's status quo, agents account for the consequences of today's policies for future policy outcomes, and there is uncertainty about who will hold future political power to propose and veto future policy changes. Today's agenda setter holds back from fully exploiting present opportunities to move policy toward her ideal point whenever future proposer and veto players are likely to be alignedeitherin favor of reform or against it. Otherwise, agenda setters advance their short‐run interests. Optimal proposals can vary discontinuously and nonmonotonically with political fundamentals.