Agenda-setting Power Research Articles

The political agenda-setting power of the media: the Europeanization nexus

ABSTRACTPrevious studies have demonstrated that the extent to which media coverage influences the issue priorities of policy-makers is contingent on the type of issues, media, and political agendas. This article contributes to this literature by elaborating on a factor that has been surprisingly neglected so far: the domestic or Europeanized character of the political issue covered in the news. Empirically, we apply time-series cross-section analyses to a dataset on media and parliamentary agendas during the years 1995–2003 in Switzerland. We find that the media’s political agenda-setting power mainly stems from news coverage of domestic issues. News on Europeanized issues have a weak impact on so-called symbolic parliamentary agendas, and no impact at all on the more substantial parliamentary agendas that may initiate decision-making processes.

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

Europe’s wicked legitimacy crisis: the case of refugees

The European Union’s response to the current and persistent – if not wicked – refugee crisis has exposed a new legitimacy challenge. Characterised by interstate bickering and undignified competition for the most draconian measures, the crisis brings to the fore many inherent tensions of the EU which cannot be easily reconciled. The crisis has revealed the many shortcomings of EU governance. Deficits of leadership and solidarity and the rise of xenophobic politics across many member states exploit growing populism with pronounced effect. This multi-dimensional problem, so resistant to a distinct solution, underscores the EU’s instability in a number of ways: its foundational values have lost resonance; its institutional inadequacies have become more apparent; its leadership and agenda-setting power have been noticeably weakened. Ultimately, the EU is no longer perceived as a problem-solver, a fact that inherently tests the legitimacy of a system that was created to solve problems.

The Agenda-Setting Power of the Prime Minister Party in Coalition Governments

Despite coalition governments being the most widespread form of government, many aspects of coalition politics are still poorly understood. This is especially true for questions relating to the role of the prime minister party within the coalition. Being the prime minister party seems to imply considerable influence, but little evidence actually exists as to the factors shaping the influence of the prime minister. This paper offers a new approach to studying the factors conditioning the influence of the prime minister party in a coalition. The approach is focused on the extent of issue overlap between the party manifesto of the prime minister party and the first government speech after the election. This approach makes it possible to actually analyze the factors shaping the influence of the prime minister party. The results show that the PM party is constrained by the issue emphasis of its coalition partners but less so when it holds dissolution power and more, also when it has many coalition partners when controlling for the seat share of the PM party. The paper, thus, both offers a new approach to study the coalition compromise and new evidence on the factors shaping the influence coming from holding the PM position.

Are You What You Tweet? The Impact of Sentiment on Digital News Consumption and Social Media Sharing

While social media has helped online newspapers by allowing users to organically share articles, some have argued that it has cannibalised and hurt newspapers through reduced readership and diminished agenda-setting power. Motivated by these two opposing effects, it is critical to understand what affects the duality between sharing news articles on social media and reading the articles on news websites. Using rich clickstream data on online news readership obtained from an English newspaper in an Asian country and social media data collected from Twitter, we focus on article sentiment as a key news content attribute and find a differential effect of sentiment on readership and sharing behaviours across the news site and third-party social media platform. Our results show that people are likely to read news articles with negative sentiment on the news site, but tend to share articles with positive sentiment on Twitter. Specifically, a 1-percent increase in content sentiment is associated with a 2.15-percent decrease in news site page views, but a 0.76-percent increase in Twitter sharing volume. Upon decomposition of news article sentiment, we also find a contrasting positive author sentiment effect and a negative news topic valence effect on news readership. To uncover the underlying mechanism of the findings, we test the key intuitions from prior self-presentation literature. We find that an increase in a Twitter user’s followers (i.e., audience size) leads to an increase in the Twitter user’s propensity to share positive-sentiment news articles. Our findings on the role of sentiment on content consumption and sharing affirm the co-opetitive but complementary relationship between news websites and social media platforms. Our results also guide publishers to better craft their news content and manage social media presence to improve audience engagement and readership outcomes while preserving the agenda-setting ability of news media.

Agenda Setting through Social Media: The Importance of Incidental News Exposure and Social Filtering in the Digital Era

Conventional models of agenda setting hold that mainstream media influence the public agenda by leading audience attention, and perceived importance, to certain issues. However, increased selectivity and audience fragmentation in today’s digital media environment threaten the traditional agenda-setting power of the mass media. An important development to consider in light of this change is the growing use of social media for entertainment and information. This study investigates whether mainstream media can influence the public agenda when channeled through social media. By leveraging an original, longitudinal experiment, I test whether being exposed to political information through Facebook yields an agenda-setting effect by raising participants’ perceived importance of certain policy issues. Findings show that participants exposed to political information on Facebook exhibit increased levels of issue salience consistent with the issues shared compared with participants who were not shown political information; these effects are strongest among those with low political interest.

The Mechanics of Cultural Diplomacy: A Comparative Case Study Analysis from the European Context

ABSTRACTThe National Institutes for Culture have not attracted much scholarly attention examining their managerial practices. The aim of this article is to explore how the state expresses its agency over the Cultural Institutes of six European countries: the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, and Greece. Agency presents varying modalities, making instrumentalism more multifaceted than has been implied so far. The authors are introducing here a framework of five “touchpoints” to capture and analyze instrumentalism in cultural diplomacy. Funding, agenda setting, evaluation, hierarchy, and appointment power constitute the typical system of interactions between the Cultural Institutes and their reporting authorities.

A climate for commerce: the political agronomy of conservation agriculture in Zambia

The promotion of conservation agriculture (CA) for smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa is subject to ongoing scholarly and public debate regarding the evidence-base and the agenda-setting power of involved stakeholders. We undertake a political analysis of CA in Zambia that combines a qualitative case study of a flagship CA initiative with a quantitative analysis of a nationally representative dataset on agricultural practices. This analysis moves from an investigation of the knowledge politics to a study of how the political agendas of the actors involved are shaping agrarian practices. From its initial focus on CA as soil conservation and sustainable agriculture, the framing of the initiative has evolved to accommodate shifting trends in the policy arena. In tandem with the increased focus on climate adaptation, we see an increased emphasis on private sector-led modernisation. The initiative has shifted its target group from the poorest smallholders to prospective commercial farmers, and has forged connections between its farmer-to-farmer extension network and private input suppliers and service providers. The link between CA and input intensification is reflected in national statistics as a significantly higher usage of herbicides, pesticides and mineral fertilizer on fields under CA tillage compared to other fields. We argue that the environmental and participation agendas are used to buttress CA as an environmentally and socially sustainable agricultural development strategy, while the prevailing practice is the result of a common vision for a private sector-led agricultural development shared between the implementing organisation, the donor and international organisations promoting a new green revolution in Africa.

March divided, fight united? Trade union cohesion and government appeal for concertation

Why does the government appeal for concertation? Starting from the principal‒agent framework and delegation theory, the article argues that the government is more willing to share decision-making power with trade unions when the policy preferences endorsed by the unions are closer to those of the cabinet. Furthermore, it maintains that government propensity to negotiate with trade unions increases as the heterogeneity of union policy preferences grows because the cabinet can exploit its agenda-setting power to divide the union front. The article tests these two hypotheses through a longitudinal analysis of the Italian case (1946–2014). In detail, it takes advantage of two original datasets built through content analysis that provide unique in-depth information on the policy preferences of parties and cabinets and measures the policy positions of the main Italian trade unions, thus allowing assessment of their reciprocal heterogeneity. The results confirm the expectations.

The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016

This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda. In 2016, partisan media appeared to be especially susceptible to the agendas of fake news, perhaps due to the election. Emerging news media are also responsive to the agendas of fake news, but to a lesser degree. Fake news coverage itself is diverging and becoming more autonomous topically. While fact-checkers are autonomous in their selection of issues to cover, they were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections.

Elites and American structural power in the global economy

This article elaborates the nature of American structural power in order to link it to the elite networks identified elsewhere. Most of this special issue looks at elites in relation to instrumental and agenda setting power. But instrumental power—control over the machinery—is effective only to the degree that the machinery is effective, and the machinery is all about structural power. American global economic power rests on two structural foundations: the ability to unilaterally create credit in the global economy, and control over a disproportionate share of global production flows and the resulting stream of profits. Elites’ ability to exploit the opportunities created by structural power makes them the prime beneficiaries of that power. Moreover, the selection mechanisms that sort individuals into elite networks, via cohort and socialization effects, assure that these individuals generally act in the interests of the organizations and institutions that they represent, reproducing structural power.

Managing Federal Transfers in Brazil: Do Coalition Members Reap Benefits?

Coalitions led by the president play an important role in the Brazilian legislature, but what do members of the president’s coalition gain from joining? We conduct a regression discontinuity analysis of discretionary, politically motivated federal transfers to Brazilian municipalities. Our innovation is to distinguish between the president’s co-partisan mayors and mayors aligned with other coalition members. We find that the president channels pre-election discretionary transfers to co-partisan mayors but does not target coalition members in municipalities. However, the president does not use these transfers to support co-partisan mayors against mayors aligned with coalition members. In other words, the president favors co-partisan mayors over opposition mayors in the two years preceding municipal elections, but not over mayors aligned with other coalition members. Consistent with a model in which coalition members have little agenda-setting power but can veto the president’s proposals, coalition members receive defensive benefits from joining the president’s coalition.

Negotiating Flexibility: External Contracting and Working Time Control in German and Danish Telecommunications Firms

This study examines how different participation rights and structures affect employee control over working time. The analysis is based on a comparison of matched call center and technician workplaces in two major telecommunications firms in Germany and Denmark. It draws on data from semi-structured interviews with managers, supervisors, and employee representatives between 2010 and 2016. Unions and works councils in both firms agreed to a series of concessions on working time policies in the early 2010s in exchange for agreements to halt or reverse outsourcing. The authors use Lukes’ concepts of decision-making and agenda-setting power to explain these common trends, as well as later divergence in outcomes. Germany’s stronger formal co-determination rights over working time proved a critical power resource for employee representatives as they sought to re-establish employee control in new, more flexible working time models.

Parliaments, constitutional conventions, and popular sovereignty

There is growing interest in the United Kingdom in holding a constitutional convention (CC) to deliberate possible reforms to the political system. What form should a CC take? Having identified a range of possible models, we examine their merits according to stated normative criteria, focusing specifically on (1) how CC membership is determined, (2) whether a CC should have agenda-setting power and (3) whether it should have power to send proposals to binding referendum. We find good reasons to support a ‘citizen majority’ membership (chosen in a near-random fashion from the general public), agenda-setting power and referendum power. However, none of these features is likely to be the most appropriate in all contexts. Further design issues concerning citizen-majority conventions, such as whether they ought to include politicians as a minority or exclude them, are also considered. While the immediate focus of discussion is the United Kingdom, the core argument has wider relevance.

Round-trip agenda setting: Tracking the intermedia process over time in the ice bucket challenge

Despite the social media’s agenda-setting power, the literature provides little understanding of how social media agendas survive and last long enough to trigger substantial public discussions. This study investigates this issue by tracking the ice bucket challenge campaign over an 18-week period. This article claims that the pattern of the intermedia process evolves over time along with the issue-attention cycle. We observed a round-trip intermedia agenda setting where the direction is reversed as the agenda waxes and wanes. Both social and mainstream media continued to generate a heightened level of issue attention after the buzz was cooled down.

La utilización del poder de fijar la agenda en la evolución del sistema de comercio multilateral de la integración “negativa” a la “positiva”

Este documento sostiene que la construcción de un régimen de propiedad intelectual globalizado (ADPIC) de la Organización Mundial del Comercio (OMC) fue emblemático del cambio de una integración "negativa" a una "positiva", que requiere que los Estados miembros de la OMC armonicen la reglamentación nacional para adecuarse a los preceptos del sistema multilateral de comercio, y representa el relativo fracaso institucional de la organización desde su creación en 1995. En el documento se examina el cambio hacia una integración "positiva" centrándose en la campaña para formular y construir el régimen de propiedad intelectual globalizado en la OMC. Al examinar el papel del poder de fijación de la agenda en la creación del Acuerdo ADPIC, este artículo tiene la intención de resaltar el alcance de la simbiosis entre la diplomacia comercial privada y el derecho mercantil internacional en la construcción de la campaña y, por lo tanto, demostrar cómo las empresas privadas han sido capaces de formalizar sus intereses específicos dentro de la OMC, mientras que agrava aún más las asimetrías que en última instancia han dado lugar a la parálisis en la regulación del comercio multilateral.

First- and second-level agenda setting in the Twittersphere: An application to the Italian political debate

ABSTRACTThe rise of social network sites reopened the debate on the ability of traditional media to influence public opinion and act as an agenda setter. To answer this question, the present paper investigates first-level and second-level agenda-setting effects in the online environment by focusing on two heated Italian political debates (the reform of public funding of parties and the debate over austerity). By employing innovative and efficient statistical methods such as the lead–lag analysis and supervised sentiment analysis, we compare the attention devoted to each issue and the content spread by online news media and Twitter users. Our results show that online media keep their first-level agenda-setting power even though we find a marked difference between the slant of online news and the Twitter sentiment.

The Mass Media and Voter Decision Making: An Assessment of Ghana’s 2012 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections

Few citizens personally attend political campaign rallies. Many depend on the mass media and other sources for news about political campaigns. In an election without the media, the voters would likely end up not having full information about whatever took place during the election. It is against this background that the current study sought to investigate the role the media play in voter choices and how this role is perceived. Using questionnaire as a data collection instrument, views of some 300 respondents from Accra, the capital city of Ghana was surveyed. Findings indicate that a significant percent of voters in Ghana’s 2012 Presidential and Parliamentary elections based their choices on what they have heard through media reports. A significant percent also were indifferent as to whether the media performed well or not. This brings to the fore the agenda-setting power of the media. The study therefore recommends that the media be more circumspect in their reportage because whatever is reported is regarded the “truth” by the many of the audiences, especially those without the capacity to personally interrogate the issues. Keywords: Ghana, Accra, mass media, voter decision, political campaigns

The ‘powerless parliament’? Agenda-setting and the role of the UK parliament in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008

This article uses a case study of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 to examine the legislative role of the UK Parliament. Parliament is often considered to be a weak legislative actor, although this view has increasingly been challenged by legislative scholars. In this case, Parliament exercised agenda-setting powers at the pre-legislative stage that produced a significant impact on legislative outcomes. The article demonstrates the value for legislative studies of disaggregating the legislative timeframe and thereby examining the power of legislatures beyond the formal decision-making process. It also identifies a set of enabling conditions – for example, extended pre-legislative scrutiny, low political salience, and synchronisation of committee timelines with the legislative process – under which legislatures might exercise agenda-setting power in other areas of policy. The case study finds that those parliamentarians who engaged with policy in the agenda-setting phase exerted greater influence over policy outcomes than those who engaged at the decision-making stage.

Legislação em saúde: um estudo sobre a iniciativa de projetos de lei no Estado do Acre

O artigo analisa as atuações dos poderes Executivo e Legislativo no Estado do Acre quanto à formulação de propostas políticas para a saúde a partir de 1999, comparando duas legislaturas. Parte-se do princípio de que o Executivo dispõe de amplo poder de agenda, o qual permite definir temas essenciais a serem apreciados pelo Legislativo, bem como determinar os passos e a sequência de procedimentos a serem seguidos ao longo do processo decisório. O estudo foi descritivo e realizado a partir de consulta a documentos da Assembleia Legislativa do Estado do Acre com acesso público. Foram identificados os projetos de lei aprovados pela Assembleia, sendo analisados por autoria, tempo de tramitação e natureza, considerando-se o contexto político-institucional. Das 93 matérias de autoria do Legislativo aprovadas entre 1999 a 2002, 20,4% trataram de temas relacionados à saúde, em especial a medicamentos, vacinas, insumos e produtos para a saúde. No período seguinte (2003-2006), das 294 proposições aprovadas, 6,8% estiveram relacionadas à saúde, envolvendo principalmente políticas, planos, programas e projetos. O estudo sugere que houve, entre os dois períodos analisados, uma mudança na natureza dos projetos de autoria do Legislativo aprovados. Os parlamentares, na segunda legislatura, fizeram uso de uma agenda leve, ao priorizarem questões honoríficas e simbólicas.