Issue-attention Cycle Research Articles

The Ecofetish: Green Consumerism in Women's Magazines

Surprisingly little research has examined environmental communication in the mass media from a feminist perspective, even as environmental communication (as a subfield of media studies) is experiencing rapid growth. This shortage is particularly interesting because like feminism and communication scholarship, feminism and theory have often been intertwined. Theorists from both fields recognize common concerns: the fetishization of consumer goods, the twin subjugation of women and nonhuman nature to patriarchal desires, and the neoliberal reliance on divisive individualist discourse, to name a few. But perhaps because it is a relatively new area of media studies (research dates only to the early 1970s), environmental communication has not yet been the subject of much - if any - feminist analysis. Starting with a preliminary examination of environmental messages in the women's popular press (specifically, women's magazines), this essay addresses that lack. Although long established, the relationship between feminism and environmentalism is certainly complicated. Beginning in the 1970s, ecofeminists identified a connection between the marginal status of both women and nature compared with masculine and economic interests. Through traditional feminine roles as mothers and nurturers, women have been theorized as somehow closer to the natural, nonhuman world. Some feminist theorists have embraced this linkage (Warren 1990; Plumwood 1991), while others have rejected it as restrictive and essentialist (Davion 1994; Seager 2003). More recently, women have been situated closer to the environment for a somewhat different reason. Because the majority of household purchasing decisions are made by women (Rodino-Colocino 2006), there is growing social acceptance of the idea that women have unique environmental agency and an obligation to ensure that their families are living in an environmentally responsible manner. Thus we are seeing a surge in commercialism that primarily targets women, who are now expected to take responsibility for addressing environmental problems that are largely the result of patriarchal capitalist expansion. This phenomenon is played out most visibly in the media, where messages aimed at women are increasingly built around commodity-based solutions to environmental ills. Applying a feminist outlook to environmental communication studies helps make sense of these media messages and how they either reflect or distort - and ultimately affect - women's lived experiences. Most simply put, a feminist point of view is one that recognizes the deeply sexist attitudes encoded in social behaviors and belief systems (Hirschmann 2003); with respect to environmental communication, this might mean cultivating an awareness of how messages identify women either with the environment or in relation to it. Such awareness would serve two purposes: first, it would reveal gendered tendencies in environmental communication; second, it would help make sense of female authences' reception and interpretation of environmental messages in the media. More than forty years ago, economist Anthony Downs speculated that media coverage of environmental problems would be subject to an issue-attention cycle, eventually falling out of public view: We should not underestimate the American public's capacity to become bored - especially with something that does not immediately threaten them (1972, 47). Downs 's prediction has been at least partially supported by recent research (Trumbo 1996; Brossard, Shanahan, and McComas 2004). When environmental issues receive media attention, the coverage has often been sensational and event-oriented, lacking the kind of context that might increase issue salience among American citizens (Guber 2003). Further, the generic word green was adopted as an all-purpose signifier by the media in the 1980s, and used heavily in environmental issue reporting to indicate an ecologically responsible stance or behavior (Anderson 1997). …

국가 정책지식의 구조와 특성에 관한 연구

이 연구에서는 경제인문사회연구회 산하 19개 정부출연 연구기관이 2003년부터 2007년까지 5년동안 생산한 정책지식은 사회와 경제 분야의 10개 정책에 집중되고 있음을 확인하고, 연구기관들의 연구과제 유사성을 다차원축척법을 사용하여 표현하였다. 이 중 5대 정책에 대해 이슈의 생존주기 유형을 파악하고 정책지식의 생산량 추이와 비교함으로써 언론관심도와 정책지식의 생산 상관관계를 살펴보았다. 또한 정책지식의 문헌에서 추출한 핵심어를 동시출현단어 분석을 통해 각 정책을 구성하는 하위 주제를 파악하였으며, 정책지식 생산기관의�汰恝諛喚� 분석 결과,�泰逞╂岵막� 유사성을 갖는 기관들은 인용관계에서 있어서도 상호 선호하는 경향을 나타냄을 확인하였다. This study analyzed research output in dominant research areas of 19 national research institutions. Policy knowledge produced by the institutions during the past 5 years mainly concerned 10 policies dealing with economy and society issues. Similarities between the research subjects of the institutions were displayed by MDS mapping. The study also identified issue attention cycles of the 5 chosen policies and examined the correlation between the issue attention cycles and the yields of policy knowledge. The knowledge structure of each policy was mapped using co-word analysis and Ward's clustering. It was also found that the institutions performing research on similar subjects demonstrated citation preferences for each other.

Revisiting Downs' Issue-Attention Cycle: International Terrorism and U.S. Public Opinion

Lamenting the lack of public awareness of international events and U.S. foreign policy is not a particularly novel exercise; yet, explaining the process by which issues enter and exit the public realm remains a challenging endeavor. Despite contributions from researchers working in international relations and mass communication, explaining public inattentiveness continues to vex scholars. However, in his article, Up and Down with Ecology: The 'Issue-Attention Cycle,' Anthony Downs provides a parsimonious and tractable model of public opinion that can be applied to foreign policy issues.1 While Downs concerns himself exclusively with domestic issues, particularly environmental issues, his model has thepotential to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the public and policymakers over critical issues such as international terrorism. With minor modifications, the model has the potential to explain public support for failed foreign policies as well. Downs' model, when applied to international terrorism, explains why policymakers seek simple solutions, why the public supports such solutions, and why the media fail to provide meaningful coverage of intractable issues such as international terrorism. Before discussing Downs' model, the basic tenets and shortcomings of some of the more prevalent theories of the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy are discussed below. This article is available in Journal of Strategic Security: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol2/iss4/1 1 Revisiting Downs' Issue-Attention Cycle: International Terrorism and U.S. Public Opinion By Karen K. Petersen

Media Coverage of Public Health Epidemics: Linking Framing and Issue Attention Cycle Toward an Integrated Theory of Print News Coverage of Epidemics

Using framing and issue attention cycle as theoretical frameworks, this study examined how print media frame public health epidemics, such as mad cow disease, West Nile virus, and avian flu. We found that “action” and “consequence” were the two frames journalists employed consistently to construct stories about epidemics in the New York Times, the newspaper used for this case study. The prominence of other frames varied with diseases. We also found different attention cycle patterns for each disease. Coverage of public health epidemics was highly event based, with increased news coverage corresponding to important events such as newly identified cases and governmental actions. We found that media concerns and journalists' narrative considerations regarding epidemics did change across different phases of development and across diseases. This suggests that journalists emphasize different narrative considerations at different stages of the issue development cycle, based on the specificity of each disease.

Media Representation of Volunteerism and the Nonprofit Sector in Rural Japan: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle’ and the Potential for Agenda-Setting

Media Representation of Volunteerism and the Nonprofit Sector in Rural Japan: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle’ and the Potential for Agenda-Setting

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages of Presidential Decision Making

Do presidents incorporate the preferences of the public into their foreign policy decisions? Previous scholarship has begun to sketch out the sources of variation in the policy–public opinion linkage, but we still lack a clear understanding of the factors that increase or decrease presidential responsiveness. To better explore the relationship, we conceptualize presidential foreign policy making as a five-stage process—problem representation, option generation, policy selection, implementation, and policy review—arguing that the degree to which presidents are responsive to public opinion varies with fluctuations in public attentiveness. At stages in which public interest is high, presidents are more likely to incorporate mass preferences into their decision making than during stages of public quiescence. The key finding in our analysis of 34 foreign policy cases is that the public's “issue-attention cycle” varies systematically across foreign policy crises and noncrises. Examining these cycles of attention allows us to make predictions about the conditions under which public opinion is most likely to influence decision making.

Media attention and the market for ‘green’ consumer products

AbstractThere are signs that a general ‘counter‐attack’ is now being orchestrated against the ‘greens’. This paper surveys the evidence regarding an ‘issue‐attention’ cycle in environmental concern in Western Europe and North America. It furthermore discusses the role of the news media in creating the cycle. It is well documented that the mass media plays an important role in determining which issues receive high or low attention by the general public. However, not only does the media's assessment of what is newsworthy mean that ‘green’ businesses will eventually lose the current of a rising issue attention cycle, but also its mere success means that stories framing ‘green’ businesses in a negative light become newsworthy while positive stories lose their newsworthiness. Therefore, and despite a large and loyal customer base, many ‘green’ companies now find themselves in a much more hostile environment than a decade ago. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science (review)

Robert Franzosi, From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences, 22) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 475 pp. What is the reader to make of a 475 page book in the Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences series that contains 56 pages of notes, 44 pages of references, and 334 pages of text bracketed by two poems in Italian? That ranges through, amongst others, sociology, linguistics, semiotics, history, and alchemy? That within the span of a few pages goes from abstract questions of epistemology or linguistics to technical details and practical advice on sampling and coding? First, this is not a standard methodological treatise on content analysis: when the author calls From Words to Numbers a kind of alchemy, and uses the metaphor of a journey to describe the book, you know that there is more here than a postmodernist's nightmare of positivism run amok. Second, the author is tremendously erudite and unafraid to show it (e.g., a single paragraph on page 19 quotes Levi-Strauss, Sorokin, Mandeville, T.S. Eliot, and Peter Berger). Scattered throughout the book are brief histories of content analysis, the quantitative study of political conflict, the development of text or story grammars in linguistics and psychology, pilgrimages and voyages of discovery. Third, a thread of postmodern irony and playfulness runs through the book, as he recognizes the likely reactions of various types of reader (skeptical historian, frustrated methodologist, Faust!--131), and even (quoting Calvino) inquires if the reader needs to pee before proceeding with the rest of the chapter. Readers familiar with Franzosi's previous methodological papers will know the basic story of From Words to Numbers. From linguisitics he adopts the concept of story grammars and combines the resulting semantic triplet of actor-action-object (and their modifiers) to collect and code narrative data on protest from newspapers, using relational database management systems to store and retrieve the data (with useful practical instructions on how to implement the method using commercial software). Like Shapiro and Markoff's work on les cahiers des doleances in Revolutionary Demands (1998), Franzosi tears content analysis coding away from the particular theoretical concerns of the researcher, thereby simplifying the coding work and leaving theoretical decisions to the researcher, not the coder. This method preserves more information than traditional methods, most importantly that concerning the relation between subject and object embedded in the narrative. Consequently network models and their graphic representation can be used to analyse the data. In addition to outlining the methodology and its theoretical underpinnings, Franzosi engages in serious and thoughtful consideration of data quality issues for researchers on protest events who use newspapers as sources of data. The critiques are familiar: selectivity and biases of newspaper reporting depending on the type, size and other characteristics of events, their place in media issue attention cycles, and their distance from the place of publication; so are the defenses: there' s no alternative, large-scale events are consistently reported, and once known, biases can be taken into account. …

La Agenda Pública en España

El objeto de este trabajo es describir la evolucion de la agenda publica en Espana, desde 1985 a 2004. La investigacion se encuadra dentro de los estudios sobre la construccion de la agenda. El material empirico del que se parte son las series temporales del CIS sobre cuales son a juicio de los ciudadanos los principales problemas de Espana. La descripcion se ha organizado en dos partes: una, en la que se analiza la evolucion de los temas de la agenda; y otra, en la que se considera la agenda en su conjunto. Las teorias empleadas para interpretar la evolucion de la agenda han sido, en el caso de los temas, el ciclo de atencion de los temas publicos, y en lo que se refiere a la agenda en su conjunto

Public Attention, Political Action: the Example of Environmental Regulation

In this paper, a rational choice model of the dynamics of public attention to politically relevant issues is proposed, responding to the following research questions: When and why does public attention arise in the .rst place? Do ‘issue attention cycles’ really exist? What issues are likely to attain which degree of public attention? How can public attention be measured soundly? In which way does public attention in.uence regulatory action, and how, in turn, is public attention affected by political action? To this end, the paper sets off with a discussion of the concepts of ‘public’, ‘issue’, ‘attention’ and ‘cycle’. Key variables of the causal model include the acuteness/severity and accessibility/visibility of the issue at stake, as well as the ability to ‘solve’ the underlying problem. In an empirical study, several environmental issues and their corresponding regulation in Germany are examined in order to test the theoretical conjectures which could, for the most part, be empirically supported.

Travel Safety, Terrorism and the Media: The Significance of the Issue-Attention Cycle

Terrorist attacks against tourists and tourism infrastructure have long been acknowledged as having significant impacts on travel behaviour. The article examines the impact of the terrorist attacks of the 11 September 2001 in the United States to reflect not only the impact of the media on influencing travel behaviour but also tourism policy, particularly with respect to security issues and government response to crisis. The article does this with respect to the notion of an issue-attention cycle of political attention to policy issues and the manner in which these are played out. Several stages of the cycle are identified and related to the post September 11 aftermath. The cycle suggests that a five stage pattern of policy attention will be followed: pre-problem stage, alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm, realisation of the cost of significant progress, gradual decline of intense public interest and the post-problem stage. The model suggests that current adoption of post September 11 security measures will likely cease to find political support once the perceived terrorist threat receives less attention in the media and, related to this, the voting public.

Effects of News Coverage on Policy Attention and Actions

Studies that examine the media-policy connection often neglect to fully explore the dynamic nature of this association over time. It is suggested that a conceptual framework that separates media effects on policy makers' attention to issues from effects on their actual behavior (or policy actions) may be key for studying the dynamic relationship between information in the media and policy response to this information. Employing this approach to the case of drunk driving between 1978 and 1995, it was found that heightened media attention to the drunk-driving problem at the beginning of the issue-attention cycle (the early 1980s) attracted greater policy attention to this issue and pressured policy makers to generate immediate, short-term solutions to the problem. Yet, once the volume of media attention to this issue started to wane (from the late 1980s onward), policy preferences gradually shifted to long-term solutions.

The Local Roots of Federal Policy Change: Transportation in the 1990s

Although allegedly "all politics is local," studies of policy changes in the United States tend to emphasize national political cleavages, national issue-attention cycles, and inside-the-Beltway approaches to issue networks. We argue that more accurate and complete explanations of national policy changes require a broader consideration of problem definition and issue framing at the local level, as well as intergovernmental political pressures. Using hearing testimony, media coverage, and other data, we test this proposition by examining alterations to U.S. transportation policy in the 1990s. The reauthorizations of the federal transportation law in 1991 and 1998, which shifted considerable discretion away from states and toward previously weak metropolitan planning organizations, are typically viewed as major victories for mass transit and environmentalists. Our analysis suggests that a conventional explanation focusing on national factors like public opinion, interest group involvement, and Congressional membership provides less leverage in accounting for these substantive and procedural policy shifts than an explanation centered on local and intergovernmental factors.

Attitudes Toward Ecosystem Management in the United States, 1992-1998

Ecosystem management has been formally adopted by a large number of state and federal agencies and by forest products firms and associations. But little research has examined people's attitudes toward this new approach to natural resource management. This study used computer methods to measure favorable and unfavorable attitudes towardecosystem management expressed in 1500 online news media stories over the period 1992 through 1998. We found that ecosystem management is on the downside of the "issue attention cycle," with the total quantity of discussion of this concept rising in the early 1990s, declining during the mid 1990s, and leveling out in recent years. Wealso found that about 78% of all attitudes expressed about ecosystem management in news stories have been favorable, comparable to past research based on surveys of the public. Our analysis suggests that ecosystem management may have become a "settled" (i.e., noncontroversial) issue with broad public acceptance.

Tracking issue attention: specifying the dynamics of the public agenda.

While interest in issues shifts daily, tracking these changes is currently done by multiple surveys, which are conducted months apart. In this article, we adapt political tracking poll methods to model the functional form of issue attention changes through three phases, including equilibrium, developing interest, and decline. We find that opinions do follow discernible cycles. Further, we test and find strong support for the "boredom" explanation that reactions to external events that are brought to the attention of the public through the media are much greater during the developing interest phase than the saturation phase. The evidence gathered from the newly adapted method has implications for modeling the issue-attention cycle and testing the effects of media coverage and external events on public interest in issues.

The Media, Public Opinion and Population Assistance: Establishing the Link

This article establishes the link between the media public opinion and population assistance. It presents a synopsis of trends in global population assistance and examines the issue-attention cycle as a means of explaining how issues attract the notice of the media and the public as well as why media reporting public opinion and government responses to global population issues differ. Much of the evidence comes from the US which has been the main source of leadership and resources for population assistance and has well-documented democratic processes and global population concerns. Overall it is noted that through their wavering interest in global population questions the media have played an undervalued role in determining global funding trends for population assistance. The evidence suggests a strong link between donor governments funding for population assistance and media coverage of global population issues in developed countries. Media focus on population matters influence public opinion which in turn influence politicians in developed countries. Therefore its not surprising that donor government support for population assistance increased in years of heightened media attention and public support.

Whither the Commission? Reform, renewal and the issue-attention cycle

'Whither the Commission?' is a question faced by officials within the Commission, would-be architects of the EU and academic observers of the EU policy process. The Commission crisis of 1999, the rise of new actors and the increased power of existing actors (such as the EP) have brought the role of the Commission to the height of the 'issue-attention cycle'. As well as instigating a comprehensive internal reform process under the guidance of Commissioner Kinnock, the Commission has sought to tackle this issue through the development of a White Paper on European Governance. This article places the current Commission proposals on the future of European governance in historical and analytical context. As the issue of the future of the Commission progresses up and down the issue-attention cycle, the most appropriate action for the Commission, it is argued, may be to sit tight and make sure that it is well prepared with palatable proposals for the next phase of 'alarmed discovery'.

Whither Japan's Environmental Movement? An Assessment of Problems and Prospects at the National Level

J N MOST INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES, environmental NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) lobby, protest, participate in administrative decisionmaking, and garner wide media attention. Japan's national environmental movement, by contrast, is politically marginalized, more underfunded than most, and almost unrecognized by the general public. Why is Japan so at odds with its OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) counterparts?' In what measure is Japan's underdeveloped civic culture attributable to lack of opportunities for meaningful participation and to what degree can it be explained by lack of inclination to participate? Though weakly consolidated at the national level,Japan's environmental NGOs are far from impotent. Indeed, at times especially in the early 1970s, when public concern about environmental pollution was at a peak they exerted considerable influence. This cyclicality of public concern is described by Anthony Downs as the issue-attention cycle.2Downs contends that public interest peaks, as it did in the early 1970s, and then gradually declines. But occasional recurrences of interest, usually with lower peaks, can be expected over the long term. In some ways, it appears as if the Japan of the early and mid-1990s had entered a period of resurging environmental interest, with heightened activity by environmental NGOs. A series of significant events among them local and national political upheavals, a tragic earthquake, oil spills, nuclear accidents, and the December 1997 United Nations climate convention in Kyoto3 have kept attention focused on environmental problems and citizen concerns. To what extent are these events creating an expanded niche, fragile though it may be, for environmental NGOs at the national level?

Issue-Attention and Punctuated Equilibria Models Reconsidered: An Empirical Examination of the Dynamics of Agenda-Setting in Canada

AbstractMost of the work on policy dynamics focuses on the agenda-setting stage of the policy cycle and argues that policy issues wax and wane in public attention, generating either a cyclical or evolutionary pattern of governmental activity in particular policy sectors. Anthony Downs's notion of a periodic “issue-attention cycle” and Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones's notion of a stepped or “punctuated equilibrium” pattern of policy change are prominent in the literature, but have received little empirical and virtually no cross-national verification. Utilizing the analysis of time-series data gathered on nuclear energy and acid rain issues appearing on government and public agendas in Canada over the period 1977–1992, this article elaborates the elements of the two models and subjects both to empirical testing. The article finds little support for either model in the Canadian case and argues the assumptions behind the models must be altered to account for this anomalous case.

Constructing climate change: claims and frames in US news coverage of an environmental issue

An empirical content analysis of a decade of coverage of climate change in five national newspapers in the US is presented. The analysis is based on the perspective, drawn from social problems theory, that the content of news discourse can be understood in terms of claims-making and framing. Climate change is also discussed in terms of Downs' issue-attention cycle, a five-stage model describing the rise and fall of social attention to important issues. Climate change, as a news story, is described as exhibiting three phases that are related to the sources quoted and the frames presented in the news coverage. Results of the analysis show that scientists tend to be associated with frames emphasizing problems and causes, while politicians and special interests tend to be associated with frames emphasizing judgments and remedies. Results also show how scientists declined as news sources as the issue became increasingly politicized.