Political Agenda-setting Power Research Articles

Using the president\u2019s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

Social media has arguably shifted political agenda-setting power away from mainstream media onto politicians. Current U.S. President Trump’s reliance on Twitter is unprecedented, but the underlying implications for agenda setting are poorly understood. Using the president as a case study, we present evidence suggesting that President Trump’s use of Twitter diverts crucial media (The New York Times and ABC News) from topics that are potentially harmful to him. We find that increased media coverage of the Mueller investigation is immediately followed by Trump tweeting increasingly about unrelated issues. This increased activity, in turn, is followed by a reduction in coverage of the Mueller investigation—a finding that is consistent with the hypothesis that President Trump’s tweets may also successfully divert the media from topics that he considers threatening. The pattern is absent in placebo analyses involving Brexit coverage and several other topics that do not present a political risk to the president. Our results are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables and examination of several alternative explanations, although the generality of the successful diversion must be established by further investigation.

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

Minimal and Massive! Politicians’ Views on the Media’s Political Agenda-Setting Power Revisited

Different methods have yielded different results regarding the media’s political agenda-setting power: Time-series studies comparing agendas in the media and politics have pointed to a minimal and surveys of politicians to massive media influence. Inspired by these findings and the suggested explanations for them, this article studies in detail politicians’ views on the media’s political agenda-setting power: How do politicians assess media’s power over different types of agendas, do they distinguish between different forms of media power, and does their individual political power position or trust in the media affect how they perceive the media’s power? A survey of Finnish members of parliament (MPs) shows that politicians perceive the media’s power to be massive regarding symbolic but minimal or moderate regarding substantial political agendas. However, many politicians do not clearly distinguish between the media’s political agenda-setting power and its political framing power. Neither experiences of being a minister nor the tendency to use the media as a scapegoat affect politicians’ views on media power in politics. The findings improve empirical knowledge on the media’s power in politics, strengthen the foundations for interpreting existing survey results, and provide a basis for further improving future surveys on media power.

More than Words and Good Intentions: The Political Agenda-Setting Power Behind Foreign Aid Mechanisms

In this paper, international aid is examined as a tool for political agenda-setting. A theoretical model is constructed for the analysis, incorporating the incentives created by foreign aid, on the political benefits of recipient governments. The model also incorporates the compensating benefits provided by these governments through the legitimization of the donor country's political agenda. The main results of this model indicate that governments which offer international assistance can influence the political agenda of recipient countries through two channels: 1) By reducing the political costs of official intervention in issues that receive aid, and 2) By generating incentives for additional political rent-seeking. The results are studied in the case of aid provided by the USA to Colombia during the period 1998-2012, which shows the power of US presidents to establish part of the Colombian political agenda related to drugs and terrorism. The results are obtained through a novel content analysis of presidential speeches in both countries and from a set of estimates corrected by possible problems of endogeneity in foreign aid allocation.

Europeanization in Parliament and in the Press

Europeanization challenges national democratic systems. As part and parcel of the broader internationalization of politics, Europeanization is associated with a shift from policymaking within majoritarian, elected representative bodies towards technocratic decisions among non-majoritarian and non-elected bodies (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2008, Lavenex 2013). It is thus said to weaken the influence of citizens and parliaments on the making of policies and to undermine democratic collective identity (Lavenex 2013, Schimmelfennig 2010). The weakening of national parliaments has been referred to as “de-parliamentarisation” (Goetz and Meyer-Sahling 2008) and has nurtured a broader debate regarding the democratic deficit in the EU. While not being a member of the EU, Switzerland has not remained unaffected by these changes. As discussed in the contribution by Fischer and Sciarini, state executive actors take the lead in Switzerland's European policy. They are responsible for the conduct of international negotiations, they own the treaty making power, and it is up to them to decide whether they wish to launch a negotiation with the EU. In addition, the strong take-it or leave-it character of Europeanized acts limits the room for manoeuver of the parliamentary body also in the ratification phase. Among the public, the rejection of the treaty on the European constitution has definitely closed the era of “permissive consensus” (Hooghe and Marks 2009). However, the process of European unification remains far remote from the European public. In Switzerland, the strongly administrative character of international legislation hinders public discussion (Vogeli 2007). In such a context, the media may serve as cue for the public: By delivering information about the extent and nature of Europeanized policymaking, the media enable citizens to form their own opinions and to hold their representatives accountable. In this sense media coverage may not only be considered an indicator of the information delivered to the public, but it may also enhance the democratic legitimacy of Europeanized policymaking (for a similar argument, see Tresch and Jochum 2005). While the previous contributions to this debate have examined the Europeanization of Swiss (primary and secondary) legislation, we take a closer look at two additional domestic arenas that are both supposed to be under pressure due to Europeanization: The parliament and the media. To that end, we rely on data gathered in a research project that two of us carried out in the context of the NCCR Democracy.1 While this project was primarily interested in the mediatization of decision-making processes in Switzerland, it also investigated the conditional role played by internationalization/Europeanization. For our present purposes, we shall exploit the two data-sets that were developed as part of a study of the political agenda-setting power of the media (Sciarini and Tresch 2012, 2013, Tresch et al. 2013): A data-set on issue attention in parliamentary interventions (initiatives, motions, postulates,2 interpellations and questions) and a data-set on issue attention in articles from the Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ). The data covers the years 1995 to 2003 and the coding of issues followed the classification system developed in the “Policy Agendas Project” (Baumgartner and Jones 1993).

The Media as Political Agenda-Setters: Journalists’ Perceptions of Media Power in Eight West European Countries

Studies in different countries have shown that the media can influence the attention politicians devote to different issues. However, knowledge about the cross-national contingencies of the political agenda-setting power of the media is limited. This study compares the perceptions of journalists of the political agenda-setting power of the mass media in eight parliamentary democracies with varying media and political systems: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on a power balance perspective, the article looks at the autonomy of the media system (audience reach and political control) and the concentration of power in the political system (number of political parties, concentration of executive power) to contextualise the role of the media in political agenda-setting. Journalists perceive most media influence in Norway and Sweden and least in Spain. The results indicate that the power balance between the media and political actors to a large extent reflects the institutional structure of the political system, but that media characteristics such as the autonomous position of television should also be taken into account.

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.

Again, the Almighty Mass Media? The Media's Political Agenda-Setting Power According to Politicians and Journalists in Belgium

The unsolved question of whether the media affect political agendas is tackled with an innovative research method: a survey among politicians and journalists in Belgium. This article shows that this new approach can complement existing knowledge and yield new insights. Results largely support the contention that media matter for politics; politicians and journalists state that the media are important agenda setters, even compared to more established political actors such as political parties and interest groups. Though not all issues are equally conducive to media agenda-setting, media always seem to matter to some extent. Some politicians more than others evaluate the media's agenda impact to be high. The actual parliamentary action of some MPs is affected more by prior mass media coverage than others. I account for these differences and show that it is mainly their political role (government or opposition), the negativity of their evaluation of media power, and their perception of the impact of public opinion on politics that determine politicians' perceptions and behavior regarding political agenda-setting.

The Mass Media's Political Agenda-Setting Power

Do mass media determine or codetermine the political agenda? Available answers on this question are mixed and contradictory. Results vary in terms of the type of political agenda under scrutiny, the kind of media taken into account, and the type of issues covered. This article enhances knowledge of the media's political agenda-setting power by addressing each of these topics, drawing on extensive longitudinal measures of issue attentiveness in media, Parliament, and government in Belgium in the 1990s. Relying on time-series, cross-section analyses, the authors ascertain that although Belgium is characterized by a closed political system, the media do to some extent determine the agenda of Parliament and government. There is systematic variation in media effects, however. Newspapers exert more influence than does television, Parliament is somewhat more likely to follow media than government, and media effects are larger for certain issues (law and order, environment) than for others (foreign policy, economic issues).

The Contingency of the Mass Media's Political Agenda Setting Power: Toward a Preliminary Theory

Recently the study of the relationship between the media and the political agenda has received growing attention of both media and political science scholars. However, these research efforts have not led to a general discussion or a real theory on the media’s political agenda setting power. This article first analytically confronts the often contradictory results of the available evidence. Then, it sketches the broad outline of a preliminary theory. Political agenda setting by the media is contingent upon a number of conditions. The input variables of the model are the kind of issues covered, the specific media outlet, and the sort of coverage. Political context variables, the features of the political actors at stake, are at the heart of the model. The model proposes five sorts of output ranging from no political adoption to fast substantial adoption of media issues.