Agenda-setting Studies Research Articles

A Discussion of Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones' The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America

In a number of important articles and books—most notably Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993), The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems (2005)—Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones have pioneered a distinctive approach to the study of agenda setting that has shaped research in both the U.S. politics and comparative politics subfields. The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America further expands on the theme of the political determinants, and implications, of “the organization and prioritization of information.” And so we have invited a number of political scientists from a range of subfields to comment on the book and on the research agenda more generally.

How Political Elites Process Information From the News: The Cognitive Mechanisms Behind Behavioral Political Agenda-Setting Effects

Political agenda-setting studies have shown that political agendas are influenced by the media agenda. Researchers in the field of media and politics are now focusing on the mechanisms underlying this pattern. This article contributes to the literature by focusing not on aggregate, behavioral political attention for issues (e.g., parliamentary questions or legislation), but on Members of Parliament’s (MP) individual, cognitive attention for specific news stories. Drawing upon a survey of Belgian MPs administered shortly after exposure to news stories, the study shows that MPs are highly selective in exploiting media cues. They pay more attention to both prominent and useful news stories, but a story’s usefulness is more important for cognitive processes that are closely linked to MPs’ real behavior in parliament. In other words, aggregate political agenda-setting effects are a consequence of the way in which individual MPs process media information that matches their task-related needs.

The third-level agenda-setting study: an examination of media, implicit, and explicit public agendas in China

ABSTRACTThrough two separate studies in the context of Hong Kong, a Chinese society, this research tests the third-level agenda-setting effects and examines the differences between the explicit and implicit public agendas based on the attributes consciously and unconsciously reported by the public. A total of 1667 news reports and 680 responses to a public survey are collected for analysis. Evidence from both studies shows strong attribute agenda-setting effects at the third level, no matter the focus of the issue is obtrusive or unobtrusive. Results also demonstrate that the media agenda is positively associated at a higher level with the implicit public agenda than the explicit one. Findings well extend the network agenda-setting research.

Why Can Some Political Systems Handle More Issues than Others? A Study of the Determinants of the Size of Political Agendas

Every political system must have an agenda if it is to prioritize the problems and issues facing it. Furthermore, this agenda will always be limited in the sense that the range of issues that could deserve attention clearly outnumbers the range of issues that actually get attention. Based on these fundamental observations a rich literature on policy agenda setting has studied how and why issues rise and fall in importance over time. In this paper we address the more fundamental question about why the policy agenda of some political systems are larger than the agenda of other systems. Addressing this question not only teaches us about an important aspect of political systems that has been ignored in previous agenda setting studies; it also holds the potential to identify why high or low issue processing decision making systems are formed.

New Avenues for the Study of Agenda Setting

Existing literature on the agenda‐setting process is grounded and well cited in studies of U.S. national institutions, but emerging scholarship has taken the fundamental principles of agenda setting—attention, information, and learning—and has extended their applicability to understudied participants and institutions. This essay highlights three areas of study that have undergone particular growth during the last few years and best represent the trend of applying the well understood dynamics of agenda setting to a broader swath of participants in the policy process. We first examine how scholars have focused on agenda setting within U.S. state and local governments and the way these institutions balance their agenda‐setting needs internally, while still trying to be heard within a federal system. Second, we highlight policy scholars' contributions to create better definitions and measures of the relationship between the media and policy process. Finally, we explore the contributions to the broader agenda‐setting literature made by scholars examining non‐U.S. institutions. These three categories are but a part of the growing trend in the subfield to expand the scope of agenda‐setting research.

Players and processes behind the national health insurance scheme: a case study of Uganda

BackgroundUganda is the last East African country to adopt a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). To lessen the inequitable burden of healthcare spending, health financing reform has focused on the establishment of national health insurance. The objective of this research is to depict how stakeholders and their power and interests have shaped the process of agenda setting and policy formulation for Uganda’s proposed NHIS. The study provides a contextual analysis of the development of NHIS policy within the context of national policies and processes.MethodsThe methodology is a single case study of agenda setting and policy formulation related to the proposed NHIS in Uganda. It involves an analysis of the real-life context, the content of proposals, the process, and a retrospective stakeholder analysis in terms of policy development. Data collection comprised a literature review of published documents, technical reports, policy briefs, and memos obtained from Uganda’s Ministry of Health and other unpublished sources. Formal discussions were held with ministry staff involved in the design of the scheme and some members of the task force to obtain clarification, verify events, and gain additional information.ResultsThe process of developing the NHIS has been an incremental one, characterised by small-scale, gradual changes and repeated adjustments through various stakeholder engagements during the three phases of development: from 1995 to 1999; 2000 to 2005; and 2006 to 2011. Despite political will in the government, progress with the NHIS has been slow, and it has yet to be implemented. Stakeholders, notably the private sector, played an important role in influencing the pace of the development process and the currently proposed design of the scheme.ConclusionsThis study underscores the importance of stakeholder analysis in major health reforms. Early use of stakeholder analysis combined with an ongoing review and revision of NHIS policy proposals during stakeholder discussions would be an effective strategy for avoiding potential pitfalls and obstacles in policy implementation. Given the private sector’s influence on negotiations over health insurance design in Uganda, this paper also reviews the experience of two countries with similar stakeholder dynamics.

A Failure to Communicate: Agenda Setting in Media and Policy Studies

In this article, we review two research programs that could benefit from a more extensive dialogue: media and policy studies of agenda setting. We focus on three key distinctions that divide these two robust research programs: the agenda(s) under investigation (public versus policymaking), the typical level of analysis (individual versus systemic), and framing effects (individual versus macro level). We map out these differences and their impacts on understanding the policy process. There is often a policy disconnect in the agenda-setting studies that emanate from the media tradition. Though interested in the effects of political communication, scholars from this tradition often fail to link the media to policy outcomes, policy change, or agenda change. Policy process scholars have increasingly rejected simple linear models in favor of models emphasizing complex feedback effects. This suggests a different role for the media—one of highlighting attributes in a multifaceted political reality and involvement in positive feedback cycles. Yet, political communication scholars have for the most part been insensitive to these potentials. We advocate a shared agenda centering on the role of the media in the political system from an information processing framework, emphasizing the reciprocal effects of each on the other.

THE CROWDING-OUT EFFECT

The study of intra-media agenda setting and issue dynamics in news reporting is essential to the understanding of the construction of issue attention cycles in the news. The present article identifies two factors—issue fatigue and issue competition—that influence the longitudinal development of issues in the news; factors that can contribute to explain the decline in attention to previously salient issues on the news agenda. Issue competition is present when a high level of attention to one issue “crowds out” attention to other issues in the same news outlet in a given period of time. The specific focus of the analysis is on the cyclical pattern in news attention to environmental issues and the article shows how environmental news is crowded-out by economic news and news on war and armed conflicts in times of crises. The empirical data consist of quantitative analyses of the attention patterns in news reporting in Swedish television news over three decades, 1979–2009.

Revisiting “Who Influences Whom?” Agenda Setting on Biofuels

Although numerous advancements have been made in the study of agenda setting among the media, the president, and Congress, scholars have struggled to develop a cohesive theory about who influences whom. To address this problem and augment the agenda-setting literature, I integrate exogenous agenda-setting variables from the American politics and policy literatures into traditional agenda-setting models. In contrast to prior research, which has tended to favor broad policy domains and foreign policy issues, I focus on one specific domestic policy area–biofuels. The results indicate that exogenous agenda-setting variables should be included in models of dynamic agenda setting, because they play an important role in the relationship among the media, the president, and Congress. In the case of biofuels, economic indicators, public opinion, and election year politics affected the agendas' of the media, the president, and Congress, and they drowned out the influence that these actors had on one another.

Minimal or Massive? The Political Agenda-Setting Power of the Mass Media According to Different Methods

The debate on the media’s agenda-setting power is not settled yet. Most empirical agenda-setting studies using time-series analyses found that the media matter for the political agenda, but the size of the found media effects remains often modest. This nuanced view on media impact seems to contradict with the perceptions of politicians. Our comparative survey of members of parliament in four small parliamentary democracies—Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark—shows that they consider the mass media to be one of the key political agenda setters directly competing with the Prime Minister and the powerful political parties. This article further explores the inconsistency between “objective” and “subjective” findings.We develop six possible explanations for the contradicting findings produced by both methods and formulate concrete suggestions to improve both methods and diminish the gap between them.

INTERMEDIA AGENDA SETTING AND NEWS DISCOURSE

This study proposes a model of strategic intermedia responses to a competitor's breaking stories by integrating intermedia agenda-setting studies and news discourse studies. The model predicts three possible responses: ignore, follow and upgrade. A content analysis of relevant stories in The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post reveals that the two major newspapers mostly ignore The New York Times' breaking stories. The next most frequent responses however are to follow and upgrade. The findings support the utility of the model.

Mapping Parties’ Issue Agenda in Different Channels of Campaign Communication: A Wild Goose Chase?

Measuring party agendas is a central enterprise in agenda-setting studies, but there is no consensus on which empirical material to use to capture such agendas, and no study systematically compares different communication channels of individual parties. A crucial question arises: To what extent do political parties campaign on the same issues in different channels of campaign communication? Using quantitative content analysis to measure the agendas of Danish parties in six campaign channels during five national elections, the article empirically demonstrates that parties emphasise quite different issues in different channels, most likely due to strategic considerations. Potentially, this conclusion has profound implications for the research field: acknowledging the dissimilarity of the same party’s issue attention in different empirical material, scholars may not be able to directly compare agenda studies based on e.g. election manifestos and commercial ads. Thus, future agenda-setting studies should include multiple channels or begin a search for a standard source.

Media Bias, Public Opinion, and Policy Liberalism from 1956 to 2004: A Second-Level Agenda-Setting Study

This study aims to explore second-level agenda-setting at the national level. In particular, it examines the relationships among the citation bias of the New York Times, national level public opinion, and Congressional policies from 1956 to 2004 in order to better understand mass media's role in national policymaking. In addition, it also tests one important intervening variable of the relationships among the three attribute agendas (the media agenda, the public agenda, and the policy agenda)—the president's policy liberalism.

Proposing Emotion as a Dimension of Affective Agenda Setting: Separating Affect into Two Components and Comparing Their Second-Level Effects

This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include emotion as affect and seeks to understand its valence. Three important findings emerged; first, the media's emotional-affective agenda corresponds with the public's emotional impressions of candidates; second, negative emotions are more powerful than positive emotions even when the topic is not a negative “problem”; and third, agenda-setting effects are greater on the audiences' emotions, defined as feelings, than on their cognitive assessments of character traits, the most common way affect is measured in agenda-setting studies.

Unemployment on the Agenda: A Panel Study of Agenda-Setting Effects During the 2006 Swedish National Election Campaign

The issue of unemployment and job creation dominated news coverage during the 2006 Swedish National Election campaign. The purpose of this study is to analyze individual-level agenda-setting effects in the 2006 Swedish National Election campaign. Apart from being one of the first agenda-setting studies conducted in Sweden, this study builds upon a panel survey with 1,007 respondents, which makes it possible to impose stricter control of the causal relationship between the media and public agendas. The overall findings show that agenda-setting effects were indeed present. Furthermore, attention to political news had stronger effects among people with low political interest compared with those who were highly interested. Education was not a contingent factor, though.

The Structure of Knowledge and Dynamics of Scholarly Communication in Agenda Setting Research, 1996-2005

By conducting a citation analysis of bibliographic references in combination with a network analysis of cocitation referencing in 56 journal publications in the area of agenda-setting research from 1996 to 2005, this paper aims to identify current exemplary publications and authoritative works in the knowledge production and dissemination process and to examine the nature of knowledge-sharing networks among the community of scholars who contribute to the growth of common knowledge in the study of agenda setting. The findings shed light on the intellectual history of agenda-setting scholarship and offer insight on subspecialties and intellectual linkages among key literature in this vigorous and ever-evolving field of inquiry.

The Influence of Institutions on Issue Definition: Children's Environmental Health Policy in the United States and Canada

This article seeks to explain why US environmental policy has increasingly focused on children's environmental health while this frame has not had the same impact on either the political agenda or policy outputs in Canada. This contrast is striking since the literature on issue definition and agenda setting suggests that redefining environmental issues in terms of a valence issue like children's health should be a promising strategy for politicians in both countries. We argue that Canada's less enthusiastic embrace of children's environmental health is a function of the institutional context, in particular fewer opportunities for policy entrepreneurship in a parliamentary government than within the US separation of powers; distinctive policy legacies in the two countries that created an opportunity to advance children's environmental health in the US but deterred it in Canada; and different opportunity structures for non-governmental actors, which prompted US environmentalists to frame their campaigns in terms of children sooner than did their Canadian counterparts. The study illustrates the value of cross-national studies of agenda setting in highlighting the influence of political institutions on issue definition.

Information Processing and Policy Dynamics

In this article, we trace the evolution of punctuated equilibrium theories of the policy process to the development of a full theory of government information processing. Noting that punctuated equilibrium is one realization of a larger theory of government information processing, we outline a research agenda for the study of agenda setting, policy dynamics, and information flows in the policy process. In doing so, we relate the study of government information processing to such important features of American government as inter‐institutional dynamics and delegation in the policy process.

Need for Orientation as a Predictor of Agenda-Setting Effects: Causal Evidence from a Two-Wave Panel Study

The purposes of this article are to test the new need for orientation (NFO) scale by Matthes (2006) in an agenda-setting study, and to explore the role of NFO for the second level of agenda setting. A panel survey on the issue unemployment was combined with an extensive content analysis of TV and newspaper coverage. The results show that NFO leads to an increase in the perceived media salience of the issue, and by doing so, it fosters the (first-level) agenda-setting function of the news media. However, although a second-level agenda-setting effect occurs, NFO has no influence on the perceived media salience of affective issue attributes. It can be concluded that NFO explains the amount of information seeking, but not the affective tone of the information that individuals are looking for.

Manchetes de jornal: a criação de um caso

Just as quickly as it creates images, concepts or myths, the media can quickly and voraciously destroy them. The presence and effects of agenda-setting are a palpable reality. The "Habitasul case", which took place in 1985 and used in this agenda-setting study, is a perfect piece to demonstrate it.