Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media

Full text

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 1 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Summary and Keywords
Recently, the number of studies examining whether media coverage has an effect on the
political agenda has been growing strongly. Most studies found that preceding media
coverage does exert an effect on the subsequent attention for issues by political actors.
These effects are contingent, though, they depend on the type of issue and the type of
political actor one is dealing with. Most extant work has drawn on aggregate time-series
designs, and the field is as good as fully non-comparative.
To further develop our knowledge about how and why the mass media exert influence on
the political agenda, three ways forward are suggested. First, we need better theory
about why political actors would adopt media issues and start devoting attention to them.
The core of such a theory should be the notion of the applicability of information
encapsulated in the media coverage to the goals and the task at hand of the political
actors. Media information has a number of features that make it very attractive for
political actors to use—it is often negative, for instance. Second, we plead for a
disaggregation of the level of analysis from the institutional level (e.g., parliament) or the
collective actor level (e.g., party) to the individual level (e.g., members of parliament).
Since individuals process media information, and since the goals and tasks of individuals
that trigger the applicability mechanism are diverse, the best way to move forward is to
tackle the agenda setting puzzle at the individual level. This implies surveying individual
elites or, even better, implementing experimental designs to individual elite actors. Third,
the field is in dire need of comparative work comparing how political actors respond to
media coverage across countries or political systems.
Keywords: agenda setting, mass media, political institutions, political elites, information processing
The political agenda is politics’ priority list. It contains the items or issues that receive
political attention. Both the conceptualization of the agenda and the meaning of what
attention implies are variable. There is no such thing as the political agenda; rather, there
are many different political agendas (Pritchard & Berkowitz, 1993). In many parliaments,
Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Stefaan Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst
Subject: Political Communication, Political Institutions Online Publication Date: Aug 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.46
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 2 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
for example, members of parliament (MPs) can ask questions about any topic to monitor
the government or organize hearings about the topics they care about. All political
systems have a legislative agenda consisting of bills and passed legislation. Budgeting is
another political agenda as each budget grasps the monetary attention for the underlying
issues. Political actors such as political parties, presidents, or governments have their
own agendas as well, the list of things they care about and intend to act upon. They
display their attentional intentions through party manifestos, government agreements,
the state of the union, or other speeches, etc. Even outsider actors, such as social
movements, highlight their issue priorities by demonstrating on specific topics and not on
others.
What unites the agendas of all these institutions and actors is the ability to capture
political attention in different forms, ranging from the proportion of hearings organized
on a specific topic, over the share of sentences devoted to an issue in a speech, to the
share of the budget spent on dealing with an issue. Attention is by definition scarce, and
that makes it consequential (Green-Pedersen & Walgrave, 2014). A substantial literature in
political science has shown that attention is a crucial pre-condition for policy change.
Without preceding political elite attention, policies can not be changed or updated (see
the foundational work: Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Jones & Baumgartner, 2005).
Political attention is important. This raises the question: Where does it come from? What
are the sources of political attention? There is a large and varied literature in political
science dealing with the matter. Some have looked at the impact of political parties on
the agenda (e.g., Klingemann, Hofferbert, & Budge, 1994), others have worked on the
agenda setting power of the president (e.g., Peake & Eshbaugh-Soha, 2008), some
investigated the influence of public opinion (e.g., Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000), some say
unexpected real-world events drive the agenda (Birkland, 1998), and still others have
looked at the impact of protest (e.g., Walgrave & Vliegenthart, 2012). There are many
answers to the question of what drives the political agenda. Within that large research
domain, there is a steadily growing body of work that looks at the impact of the mass
media on the political agenda. Preceding media coverage of issues translates into later
political attention, these media and politics scholars claim.
This article reviews that work. Our aim is to go well beyond simply summarizing what
media and political agenda scholars have found so far. Our primary goal is to critically
highlight the lacunae and the weaknesses in extant work, and to point to possible
avenues for future work. We argue that there are at least three ways in which work on
the media’s political agenda power could and should be further developed. First,
theoretically, what political agenda influence of the media actually entails and why
politicians adopt media issues should be better theorized. Second, methodologically, we

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 3 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
argue that the field is in need of studies at the level of individual politicians. And third,
empirically, there is a need for systematic comparative work.
What We Know About the Media’s Agenda
Setting Power
There is a considerable stream in the broad field of political communication, nurtured by
both political science and by communications scholarship, that deals with to what extent
and how the media contribute to establishing the political agenda. The older work was
summarized in the review paper by Walgrave and Van Aelst (2006), published ten years
ago. A systematic search for the most recent studies published during the last ten years
(2005–2015), yields 32 studies that directly deal with political agenda setting by the
media. (This section draws heavily on our recent literature review—Van Aelst &
Walgrave, 2016. We refer to that study for a more systematic discussion of the studies
listed in Table 1.) About two thirds of these studies (21) analyze the actual outputs of
political institutions, measured mostly via the behavior of political elites, and link these to
preceding media coverage (here are the studies that are not cited elsewhere in this
chapter: Eshbaugh-Soha & Peake, 2005; Roggeband & Vliegenthart, 2007; Tan & Weaver,
2007; Tresch, Sciarini, & Varone, 2013; Valenzuela & Arriagada, 2011). The balance of the
studies draw on survey or interview data and basically employ assessments of the media
power by political elites themselves. Both types of studies, the “objective” and the
“subjective,” lead to different conclusions. The objective studies found the media power
to be existent but modest; the subjective studies, in contrast, suggest that the media’s
influence on the political agenda is substantial (Van Aelst & Walgrave, 2011; Walgrave,
2008). Since the former draw on hard and better evidence, we only review the behavioral
studies here. These recent behavioral studies are summarized in Table 1.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 4 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial
use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Table 1. Behavioral Studies on the Influence of the Media Agenda on the Political Agenda (2005–2015)
Issues Media
agenda
Political
agenda
Method Period Country Bi-
directional
Media’s
impact
Eshbaugh-
Soha, &
Peake (2005)
Economy Television President
(speeches),
Congress (bills)
Time Series 1981–
2000
United
States
Yes Moderate
Roggeband &
Vliegenthart
(2007)
Immigration
and integration
Newspapers Parliament
(questions)
Time Series 1995–
2004
Netherlands Yes Moderate
Tan &
Weaver (2007)
All issues Newspaper Congress
(hearings)
Time Series 1946–
2004
United
States
Yes Moderate
Walgrave,
Soroka,
Nuytemans
(2008)
All issues Newspapers Parliament
(questions,
interpellations),
Government
(orders)
Time
series,
Cross
sectional
1993–
2000
Belgium Yes Moderate

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 5 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial
use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Van Noije,
Kleinnijenhuis
& Oegema
(2008)
Agriculture,
Drugs,
Environment,
Immigration
Newspapers Parliament
(debates)
Time Series 1988–
2003
Netherlands,
United
Kingdom
Yes Strong
Green-
Pedersen &
Stubager
(2010)
All issues Radio Parliament
(questions)
Time Series 1984–
2003
Denmark No Moderate
Vliegenthart
& Walgrave
(2011A)
All issues Newspapers,
Television
Parliament
(interpellations
+ questions)
Time Series 1993–
2000
Belgium No Strong
Vliegenthart
& Walgrave
(2011B)
All issues Newspapers,
Television,
Radio (DE)
Parliament
(interpellations
+ questions)
Time Series 1984–
2003
Belgium,
Denmark
No Strong
Valenzuela,
Arriagada
(2011)
Crime,
Unemployment,
Poverty,
Health,
Education
Television Government
(annual
presidential
statement)
Time
Series,
Cross
sectional
2000–
2005
Chili yes Strong

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 6 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial
use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Delshad (2012)Biofuel Newspapers President
(speeches),
Congress (bills)
Time series 1999–
2008
United
States
yes Weak
Jenner (2012)Environment Newspaper,
Magazine
(pictures)
Congress
(hearings)
Time Series 1969–
1992
United
States
yes Moderate
Olds (2013)Economy
(recession,
inflation,
unemployment)
Television President
(speeches)
Time Series 2004–
2012
United
States
Yes Weak
Tresch,
Sciarini,
Varone (2013)
All issues Newspaper Parliament
(multiple),
Government
(multiple),
Referenda
Cross
sectional
(yearly
correlations
per policy
phase)
1996–
2003
Switzerland No Moderate
Bonafont &
Baumgartner
(2013)
All issues Newspapers Parliament
(questions)
Time Series 1996–
2009
Spain yes Strong

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 7 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial
use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Thesen (2013)All issues Radio Parliament
(questions),
Government
(press
briefings)
Causal
micro-
analysis
(News story
level)
2003–
2004
Denmark No Strong
Van Aelst &
Vliegenthart
(2014)
All issues Newspapers Parliament
(questions)
Causal
micro-
analysis
(question
level)
1995–
2010
Netherlands Yes Strong
Joly (2014)Foreign affairs Newspapers Humanitarian
aid allocation
Time series 1995–
2008
Belgium No Moderate
van der Pas
(2014)
Immigration,
EU integration
Newspapers Parliament
(questions)
Time series 1995–
2010
Netherlands,
Sweden
no Moderate
Miller,
Nadash,
Goldstein
(2015)
Health care Newspapers Government
(state care
spending),
Parliament
(state bills)
Cross
sectional
1999–
2008
United
States
no Moderate

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 8 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial
use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Vliegenthart
& Montes
(2014)
Economic crisis Newspapers Parliament
(questions)
Time Series 2004–
2011
Netherlands,
Spain
yes Moderate
Sevenans &
Vliegenthart
(2015)
All issues Newspapers Parliament
(interpellations
+ questions)
Time Series 1995–
2011
Belgium,
Netherlands
No Strong

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 9 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Increasing Media Impact on the Political Agenda
The evidence summarized in Table 1 suggests that the media do impact the agenda. It is
hard, of course, to systematically assess and compare the strength of the media effect on
the political agenda found by these 21 studies; many studies use other measures,
statistics, and operationalizations of the key independent and dependent variables. But
after close and comparative reading of the studies, we tried to classify them as
concluding that the media have a “weak,” “moderate,” or “strong” impact on the political
agenda. Of the 21 studies, two concluded that the media only matter weakly, eleven
found the impact of the media to be moderate, while eight concluded that the impact of
the mass media was strong.
This is an important difference with our previous overview of the literature, using the
same partly subjective classification, when we concluded that a majority of studies
pointed in the direction of weak or modest impact (Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2006). Looking
more closely at the table shows that a large majority of studies (18/21) have examined the
media’s impact on parliamentary agendas—questions and hearings. Actions by the
executive branches have been the object of scrutiny less often, and when they have been
scrutinized, it pertained mainly to discursive behavior of the executive—speeches, annual
statements or press briefings. Rarely has hard policy output—budgets, executive orders,
etc.—been analyzed, with a few notable exceptions (Joly, 2014; Miller, Nadash, &
Goldstein, 2015; Walgrave, Soroka, & Nuytemans, 2008). So, recent work suggests that the
media basically do matter—for the symbolic political agenda, or for what politicians say
rather than for what they do.
Media Impact Is Contingent
The extant, recent evidence also points towards several contingencies. The media are
more influential regarding some issues than regarding others (Walgrave, Soroka, &
Nuytemans, 2008; for somewhat older work regarding issue differences, see Soroka, 2002).
There does not seem to be a strong difference between various types of media, though;
newspapers do not seem to matter more than TV news coverage, for example.
Two patterns found by recent work have been confirmed in several studies. First,
opposition parties are more responsive to media coverage than government parties
(Green-Pedersen & Stubager, 2010; Thesen, 2013; Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011A, 2011B). The
broad, problem-seeking, often conflicting, and negative coverage prevailing in the mass
media is more readily usable by opposition parties, than by government parties.
Especially in coalition governments, majority party MPs must be very careful in what they

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 10 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
do in order not to destabilize their own government; majority MPs use the media
moderately and with caution. Opposition party members do not experience these
constraints and can use the media freely to challenge the government.
Second, the so-called “issue ownership” of parties plays a role in how they react to media
coverage. Parties care more about some issues than about others, they have a more
outspoken position on some issues, and they establish more competence over these
issues. This makes them “owners” of the issue in the eyes of the citizens (Budge & Farlie,
1983; Petrocik, 1996). Some of the studies in Table 1 found that parties react more on issues
that are covered in the media when they are the owners of the issue (Green-Pedersen &
Stubager, 2010; Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011A). This suggests, more generally, that
parties react strategically and instrumentally to the news of the day. The news provides
them with a window of opportunity to promote the issues they already care about
(Elmelund-Præstekær & Wien, 2008). The media may not be the real cause of their
attention, but rather an accelerator of their public display of attention regarding issues.
Time Series as the Dominant Method
For our purpose here, critically assessing the state of the field and suggesting ways
forward, two columns in Table 1 are especially relevant: the methods and the country
columns. Regarding the methods, the predominance of time series designs is clear.
Seventeen of the 21 recent studies employ some kind of time series design whereby
causality is inferred by looking at the media coverage’s temporal precedence over
political activities. This work typically is highly aggregated. It looks at issue coverage of
the media and, for example, at the subsequent reactions of the parliament via questions,
bills, or hearings. A few time series studies have slightly disaggregated their evidence by
looking at separate parties, but most have not.
Apart from the dominating time series studies, some rare work relied on detailed and
more disaggregated process tracing designs whereby concrete parliamentary questions,
for example, were specifically retraced to media coverage (Van Aelst & Vliegenthart, 2014)
or, reversely, where the consequences of select media stories were traced in
parliamentary questions (Thesen, 2013). In sum, the methodological toolbox of current
agenda work is pretty limited. As we argue below, this hinders further developments in
the field. To deepen our knowledge of how agenda setting by the media works and to
advance theory, we need to complement the current designs with other methods.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 11 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Hardly Any Comparative Work
The most striking weakness of the current work is the nearly total absence of
comparative work. The country column in Table 1 indicates that only five of the 21 studies
include evidence regarding more than one country. All other studies focused on one
country only. Walgrave and Van Aelst (2006) criticized the pre-2006 literature for being
almost exclusively made up of U.S. studies. This has changed remarkably over the last
ten years as a minority of studies (6/21) uses U.S. evidence and almost as many studies
rely on Dutch (6), Belgian (5), or Danish (3) data. But the spread of agenda work to more
countries has not boosted real comparative work. The rare work that does deal with data
from several countries looks mostly for similarities across countries and uses its two-
country design more as a robustness check—do the patterns hold across two nations?—
than as a source of new theory or insights into how the media’s role in politics varies
across systems (four of the five comparative studies in Table 1 do not try to explain
across-country differences: Sevenans & Vliegenthart, 2015; van der Pas, 2014;Van Noije,
Kleinnijenhuis, & Oegema, 2008; Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011B). The only exception we
know of among the behavioral studies is the work in the Netherlands and Spain by
Vliegenthart and Montes (2014) showing that MPs in these two countries react differently
to newspaper coverage due to distinct media (political parallelism) and political system
(majoritarian) features.
The agenda studies that relied on surveys and interviews with policy makers are more
often of the comparative kind (e.g., Van Aelst & Walgrave, 2011; Lengauer, Donges, &
Plasser, 2014; Maurer, 2011;). But even the fifteen-country study by Midtbø, Walgrave, Van
Aelst, and Christensen (2014) does not yield across-country findings that allow theorizing
about systemic differences in media power. With the exception of the eight-country study
by Van Dalen and Van Aelst (2014) that we will discuss later on, the few comparative
studies are more about country similarities than about country differences. In sum, we
know hardly anything about cross-country difference in the media’s agenda-setting
power.
Why Political Actors Adopt Media Issues
While recent work has found that media coverage does affect the political agenda, it has
been much less vocal as to why political elites respond to media cues. In other words, a
firm theoretical foundation for the found effect of setting the political agenda is still
lacking (but see an attempt by Jones & Wolfe, 2010; Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2006). The

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 12 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
situation reminds us of the early days of the public agenda setting work. When McCombs
and Shaw found in their 1972 study that citizens’ issue priorities were strongly
associated with media coverage of issues, a theory of why citizens adopt media cues was
lacking as well; early public agenda setting work was undertheorized. Only much later,
the underlying mechanism of agenda setting—the storage of information into memory
and the accessibility of that information (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007)—was specified.
To further develop the field of political agenda setting, more efforts need to go to
specifying the underlying theoretical mechanisms. In contrast to public agenda setting,
where the mechanism is an accessibility effect—when people are asked what they care
about they look into their memory for the things they have experienced (in the media)
recently and/or frequently—political agenda setting might be more a matter of
applicability. Depending on their position in a political system, political actors have a
specific task. Government MPs, for example, have different tasks and pursue different
goals than opposition MPs. Political actors respond to media coverage when the
information encapsulated in the media signal matches their task, when the media cue is
applicable to their goals. The essential difference with public agenda setting lays in the
fact that the political agenda setting effect is a behavioral effect, it deals with what
political actors are doing, while the public agenda setting effect is a cognitive effect, it
deals with what ordinary citizens are thinking. That is why political agenda setting is
more a matter of applicability (to the behavioral task) than of accessibility (from
memory). In a new study, Sevenans, Walgrave, and Epping (2016) disentangle the different
types of attention individual political elites pay to media stories. They find politicians’
cognitive recall, just like that of citizens, to be driven by the accessibility of the media
stories; their informal behavior and their intention to act on these stories, in contrast, is
affected by applicability. This finding directly supports the applicability notion.
Media coverage is used in politics because it is suitable for political elites. It is relevant to
furthering their goals. The information encapsulated in media coverage forms a useful
political resource. First, the media form a formidable source of factual information about
societal problems and their potential solutions. Politicians simply learn about society via
the news. They not only learn from the media about problems and solutions but also
about public opinion (Herbst, 1998). They even learn from the media about what other
political actors are doing or up to (Davis, 2007).
Additionally, how the media bring this information often fits political actors’ goals. Media
coverage is fast and succinct, it is negative (Lengauer, Esser, & Berganza, 2012), often
framed in a conflictual way (Neuman, Just, & Crigler, 1992), and frequently attributes
responsibility to specific actors for things that go bad (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). All
these features make news an attractive resource for politicians to nurture their political

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 13 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
activities and to react on media coverage openly or more covertly. Especially for the
opposition, for example, the media produce a constant stream of bad news stories that
can be employed in their fight with the government. No wonder some studies found the
media to be a stronger agenda setter of the opposition’s than of the government’s agenda
(for example, Walgrave et al., 2008).
Third, the media not only deliver information that may be useful, they also form a
platform that political actors need to connect with their voters. Politicians vie for media
coverage. One way to get into the news is by reacting on it. Since media attention is
cyclic (Downs, 1972), adopting media cues increases the chances that one will get media
coverage (see also van Santen, Helfer, & Van Aelst, 2015; Wolfsfeld & Sheafer, 2006). That
is why most studies found the political reaction to media coverage to be immediate—if
politicians wait to react to media coverage, they risk that the momentum is already gone
(for example, Walgrave et al., 2008).
One way to further specify why and how the media affects the political agenda and to
deepen the proposed applicability logic, is to look more meticulously into the exact
content of the media coverage. While political agenda setting essentially is a transfer of
mere issue salience from the media to politics, examining how the issue is covered in the
news, is a promising way forward. Technically speaking, the question is whether how the
news is framed moderates the political agenda setting effect. In other words, is some
coverage more applicable to political actors’ tasks than other coverage? The more
general policy literature, which does not deal so much with media coverage, but with how
issues are framed and portrayed, suggests that framing should make a difference. Both
Schattschneider (1960) and Kingdon (1984) emphasized the importance of the definition of
an issue to let it move up the agenda, and they considered politics to be about a struggle
to let one’s specification of the issue prevail. Recent policy work showed, for example,
that framing the issue of capital punishment in the United States in terms of eradicating
the risk that innocent people would be found guilty and sentenced to death, has had
major consequences for its gradual abolishment (Baumgartner, De Boef, & Boydstun, 2008;
for another example, see Rose & Baumgartner, 2013). Earlier work in the United States
found that negative news, compared to positive news, leads to different, and more, policy
activity (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993).
A small but growing portion of recent studies has begun to include media framing and
tone in political agenda setting studies. These studies offer strong support for the
applicability mechanism as a driver of the media effect. The work by Thesen (2011, 2013) on
Denmark is exemplary in this respect. Based on a detailed study of parliamentary
questions, he shows that news with a negative tone and news that attributes
responsibility for the bad situation to the government, leads to more questioning behavior

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 14 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
of opposition than of government MPs. Such news is, of course, much more useful for the
opposition than for the government; in fact, it is downright damaging for the government.
Interestingly, Thesen finds that government MPs use the news as well: when it is positive,
they draw on it to defend their policy record. In a recent study covering parliamentary
questions in Sweden and Spain, Van der Pas (2014) finds that parties’ reaction to media
coverage about integration and immigration in the European Union is conditioned by how
the news is framed. Parties react only when the frame the media uses matches their own
understanding of the issue. She concludes:
When media reporting provides a context in which their frame prevails, their
policy solutions appear more plausible, so it makes sense to strike iron when it’s
hot and discuss the issue in parliament at that moment. In contrast, if parties
broach a topic while the framing of it in the media is in discord with their platform
and framing, they will have a hard time finding support for their policies (Van der
Pas, 2014, p. 46).
A third study, investigating the moderating role of tone and framing is a recent work by
Sevenans and Vliegenthart (2015). Drawing on data from Belgium and the Netherlands,
they find that MPs in these countries ask more questions in response to the news when it
has been framed in a conflictual way. Finally, another new study by Sevenans, Walgrave,
and Epping (2016) showed that political news, news that is told from a political perspective
and featuring political actors—one may call this a “political” frame—gains more attention
from political actors than non-political news. In sum, a handful of recent studies indicate
that framing and tone of the media may matter as they increase the political usefulness of
the news. This is a promising avenue, but more work is needed. The found patterns
require replication in more countries and, especially, a broadening of the frames beyond
attribution of responsibility and conflictual framing seems to be in order.
When thinking about the theoretical underpinnings of the effect of news coverage on the
political agenda, another question is to what extent political adoption is proportional to
the media’s attention. In fact, the policy agenda literature heavily supports the idea of the
disproportionate reactions of institutions to incoming, societal signals (Jones &
Baumgartner, 2005). Due to cognitive and institutional friction, these scholars show, policy
outputs are not in proportion to the societal inputs. Time and again, students of policy
agendas, have found that all policy outputs—including questions in parliament, speeches,
or bills—are non Normally distributed but are spiked, abrupt, and stochastic, while their -
societal input is, by definition, Normally distributed (Baumgartner et al., 2009; Jones,
Sulkin, & Larsen, 2003). These findings strongly suggest that the political adoption of
media cues—the media are just delivering one type of societal signals—may be
disproportional as well. Yet, there is no work that examines this potentially non-linear

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 15 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
reaction of politics on the media. All recent studies in Table 1 and in the earlier studies,
simply modeled the media effect as being a linear effect, supposing that a one-unit
increase in media attention has a similar effect on the political agenda on a high level as
on a low level of media attention. But this is very unlikely. So, a second theoretical
advance would be not only to dig deeper into the applicability of the media but also to
conceive of the media effect as a potentially non-linear effect (see also Wolfe, Jones, &
Baumgartner, 2013).
Disaggregating Political Agenda Setting
Effects
Students of the media and political agendas are beginning to get a better grip on why the
political agenda follows media cues. The phenomenon of the media agenda affecting the
political agenda in itself is by now well documented and appears to be widespread. But
our knowledge of the exact mechanisms of media power is shallow. Instead of looking
further for the mere existence of media effects, the field should aim for making more
theoretical advances. The concept of applicability appears to be a necessary element in
any theory having the ambition to explain the media’s political agenda effects. The
present studies dealing with the precise content of the news, its framing, and its tone, as
well as studies finding differences between government and opposition parties or dealing
with owned vs. non-owned issues, point the way.
We argue that the field can probably advance most by disaggregating its research
designs. Currently, agenda setting is empirically investigated as a macro-phenomenon,
general media coverage affects the output of political institutions. But underlying the
macro behavior of institutions (e.g., parliaments), or the meso-behavior of organizations
(e.g., parties), is the micro-behavior of individuals. The macro-level policy agenda work,
invariably finding irregular and spiked attention to issues, builds on the premise that the
limited cognitive architecture of individual human beings occupying positions in political
institutions is driving the well-established macro-patterns. In fact, the whole bounded
rationality approach to politics is based on the assumption that, ultimately, individuals
attend to and process information (Simon, 1985). If individuals deal with information and
let their attention be determined by the media agenda, then we should start looking at
individual elites to further our knowledge about political agenda setting. In fact, it is the
“half-way” disaggregation to parties that has taught us the most so far and pointed the
way, for example, to the role of opposition or of issue ownership. Further disaggregating
the evidence and designs and addressing individual elites is the natural next step.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 16 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
The concept of applicability—information is used when it matches certain tasks or goals—
relates foremost to individuals who have varying tasks and who set themselves different
goals. Of course, institutions or organizations within those institutions have tasks and
goals as well, but there is much more variation at the individual level. Note that our plea
for disaggregated research designs targeting individual elites maps nicely onto the past
evolution of the public agenda setting field. There as well, the research domain started
with a number of compelling aggregate studies, but very soon, due a desire to develop
better theory and to better understand why citizens’ issue priorities are affected by media
coverage, the individual level studies pervaded the field and came to be the dominant
methodological approach (the first individual-level public agenda study was probably
Weaver, 1977).
Moving to the individual level not only allows us to formulate more precise theory but
also to remedy some of the methodological problems aggregate-level studies are
wrestling with. The bulk of time-series studies listed in Table 1, as well as the older
studies, are mostly suggestive of media effects, but they cannot establish causality with
absolute certainty. First, we saw an increase of studies that deal with multiple or even all
issues. These broader studies give a more complete picture of the interaction between
media and politics, but they do not include a measurement of the real world in their
designs. This is in contrast with studies that focus on only one issue, such as the economy
(and control for economic conditions or unemployment rates; see for example, Eshbaugh-
Soha & Peake, 2005; Olds, 2013; Vliegenthart & Montes, 2014) or the environment (and
control for emission statistics or food prices; see Delshad, 2012; Jenner, 2012). However,
when these all-issue studies find that the media set the political agenda, this may be due
to the fact that the media simply react faster on real world developments than political
actors, making it appear that those who react to the media are just reacting to the real
world. Added to that, media coverage itself is driven by leading political actors (see for
example indexing theory by Bennett, 1990), which raises endogeneity issues, especially if
political actors steer media coverage by concealed leaking of information or by appearing
as anonymous sources in the news. A third problem the prevailing time-series method is
wrestling with is that the issues are mostly aggregated at a very high level; for example,
all economic issues are subsumed under one economic super issue (but see Eshbaugh-
Soha & Peake, 2005; Olds, 2013). This makes it hard to examine whether, for example, news
coverage regarding the mortgage crisis actually led to more parliamentary questioning
on the mortgage crisis or rather to questions regarding another, maybe unconnected,
economic issue. Of course, the fact that many time-series studies covering different
issues in different countries uncovered remarkably similar patterns strongly increases
confidence in the fact that we are dealing with a truly causal relationship, in which
preceding media coverage leads to subsequent political attention. Still, causal inference

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 17 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
and precise causal identification, especially for large-scale all-issue analyses, remains a
challenging problem for time-series studies.
Studies at the individual level are less inflicted by these possible methodological hitches.
Cause and consequence are more closely connected and more easily observable. Some
studies already exist. For example, a recent study by Sevenans, Walgrave, and Vos (2015)
questioned Belgian MPs about their reactivity to media stories. It found that individual
MPs with particularly partisan goals—MPs who engage in the partisan battle and try to
damage other parties—are more responsive to media cues than MPs who rather aim to
make policy. The study underscored, again, the importance of the applicability of the
media information. For the so-called “party warriors” among the MPs, media cues are
more fit for their war-mongering task than for the policy-makers.
Ultimately, the field is, and should be, moving towards implementing full experimental
designs that directly assess agenda reactivity by political elites to media coverage.
Quickly gaining popularity in communications and political science alike (Iyengar, 2001),
the experimental method is the best way to disentangle the causality and intricate
mechanisms of agenda setting. The main problem of this approach is gaining access to
political elites, which challenges its feasibility. Although much recent work has managed
to survey elites in many countries (e.g., Deschouwer & Depauw, 2014), it appears to be the
case that the access problem is even more outspoken in larger countries in which elites
are likely to experience more time constraints and to be more overburdened. Further
development of the field, drawing on the individualistic and experimental methods, may
therefore remain restrained to smaller country studies. Still, we plead for survey-
embedded experiments, or vignette experiments, in which elites are exposed to
differently framed media stories, for example, or to information that comes from media
and information that does not come from the media The main problem is that
experiments with elites cannot study elites’ actual behavior, but can only examine what
they tell us about their potential or intentional behavior following up on a media story
they were asked to read or watch. In a sense, we remain stuck with elites cognitive
reaction. The question remains to what extent elites’ reactions to media stimuli recorded
in a survey are predicting their real world reactions, which is the classic external validity
problem. Therefore, an alternative way forward is to focus more in-depth on the
interaction between media coverage and policy makers in specific case studies.
In recent years, a handful of scholars analyzed the role of the media in concrete cases of
policymaking, but such studies have remained rare so far. For instance, some studies
focused on healthcare related topics, such as the work of Tieberghien (2014) on drug
policy in Belgium, while Katikireddi and Hilton (2015) addressed the role of the media in
the debate on alcohol minimum prizing in Scotland. In the Netherlands, Melenhorst (2015)

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 18 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
investigated the legislative process that resulted in the legal regulation of remuneration
for (semi)public officials, and Ardic, Annema, and van Wee (2015) studied two cases of
road pricing policy. The case-study approach allows investigators to detangle when and
why politicians react to certain types of news coverage and take into account both the
amount of attention and the framing of the topic. The findings of these case studies on
the policymaking role of the media show striking similarities. First, they all conclude that
media coverage had an influence on the political debate and the actions of policy makers.
Media attention is seen mostly as a way to keep a topic high on the public and political
agenda, not just in the beginning but throughout the policy process. Second, the cited
studies stress the strategic nature of these reactions: politicians never react
automatically to the media but rather are selective in support of their interpretation of
the issue at stake. Of course, case studies score lower in term of generalizability, but
their supplementary insights on when, how, and why individual political actors use the
media is certainly useful.
Wrapping up, a promising way forward is to study individual elites and the adoption of
media issues on their personal agendas in greater detail, ideally in an experimental or in-
depth way. This will lead to examination of the mechanisms underlying the macro-
findings, to discover new mechanisms that cannot be studied at the aggregate level, and
to directly address some of the methodological issues the aggregate level studies are
struggling with. Of course, in the end, the goal must be to integrate the micro- and
macro-level studies into one overarching theory of agenda setting by the media. As we
argued here, the notion of the applicability of the information encapsulated in media
messages is the most promising way to integrate existing and future work on the
aggregate and the disaggregate level.
Systemic Variation in the Media’s Agenda
Power
Above we mentioned the quasi absence of comparative work examining whether the
media matter more, or differently, for setting the political agenda in some countries
compared to others (see also Van Dalen & Van Aelst, 2014). We believe it to be highly
likely that the media do not play identical roles across countries. The variations in media
systems and political systems should affect how elites process and react to the news.
Since the availability of comparative data is increasing, due to the existence of
comparative datasets such as those of the Comparative Agendas Project and due to the
spread of automated coding, we expect comparative studies to gain momentum. We can
formulate several expectations that future comparative work could test.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 19 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Regarding media system differences, in systems with strong locally segmented media
markets, for example, the media cater to the interests of their local audience. They
mostly cover local stories, and these are less relevant for national MPs. In national media
markets, in contrast, we expect more media responsiveness as the national media outlets
bring news that may be relevant to nurture elites’ parliamentary and other activities.
Another media factor may be the political parallelism of the media. In some countries, the
media are more openly partisan than in others. They are associated with parties and/or
they support specific parties (Groeling, 2013; Hallin & Mancini, 2004). This makes them
cover different issues. In those countries, parties may be more reactive to befriended
media than to media outlets affiliated with competing parties. This basically is what
Vliegenthart and Montes found in their study of the political reactions to economic
coverage for Spain (2014). In the Netherlands, a country with a much less partisan press,
no such effects where found.
A third media system feature that may be of importance is the fragmentation of the media
market. If many different outlets co-exist in a country, and if these outlets systematically
cover different issues (for example, the latter is the case in Spain, according to Bonafont
& Baumgartner, 2013), this should attenuate the impact of media coverage on politics.
Eilders (1997) suggested, some time ago, that the consonance of the media matters for
their political agenda effect, but no study has directly tested this—although a recent
study by Sevenans, Walgrave, and Epping (2016) shows that stories that are covered in
many news outlets at the same time have a higher chance of being the object of intended
action by MPs than stories that receive much less consonant coverage.
In terms of political system features, one could think of many characteristics could make
a difference. The most important of all possible political system differences is the
electoral system, proportional versus majoritarian. It affects the amount of elected
parties in a country and whether the government typically is a coalition government or
not (Lijphart, 1999). In a proportional and fragmented party system, party competition and
individual competition are tougher. More politicians have unsafe, or insecure, seats, and
this may increase their responsiveness to the media. Inversely, earlier work has found
politics to be more reactive, not less, to public opinion in two-party systems compared to
multi-party systems (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010), suggesting just the opposite: more media
reactivity in two-party systems. Either way, examination of these differences should be
high on the research agendas of scholars. The power ratio between government and
parliament may be another variable worth pursuing. When parliament is strongly
dominated by the government and, in particular, when the information asymmetry
between both central democratic institutions is large, MPs may rely more on mass media
to get their information and to challenge or monitor the government.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 20 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
It may be the case that media and political system features must be taken into account
together to make sense of the media’s agenda influence. This is what Van Dalen and Van
Aelst (2014) argue when they talk about the “power balance” between politics and mass
media. Media systems with autonomous outlets that have their own independent
resources exert more influence, they say. Political systems, with low cohesiveness and
fragmented power, undergo more media influence. Based on political journalists’
perceptions of the media’s power to set political agendas, they test their approach and
find that the media’s power is small in countries with weak media (small reach, low
autonomy) and with political power concentrated in the hands of a limited number of
political actors (few parties, one-party government). In countries with strong media, and
power shared among multiple players, the opposite perception exists among journalists.
Spain is a typical example of the former case, whereas Norway and Sweden are examples
of the latter case. Van Dalen and Van Aelst’s work is the most elaborate effort so far to
examine media power comparatively. Its main weakness is that it draws on the
perceptions of journalists and not on a direct empirical analysis of the behavior of
politicians. Wrapping up, we can conclude that more comparative work is needed.
Conclusion
The media are one source of influence on the political agenda. During the last decade,
gradually more studies in more countries have empirically tackled the media’s power to
set political agendas. Within the broader research on media and politics, media and
political agenda setting has become one of the most active and vibrant subdomains. Most
of this work confirms the existence of media effects on the political agenda, in particular
on the parliamentary agenda. The media’s agenda power is contingent, though, on the
issue at stake, on parties being in government or in the opposition, and on the ownership
of parties over issues.
To make further progress in a subdomain that has gained a certain maturity lately, we
put forward three avenues for further research. First, the media’s agenda impact must be
better theorized. The question of why political actors adopt media issues is not well
understood. We argue that the applicability of the media signal to the work and goals of
the political actors should take center stage in such a theory. Political actors do not react
mechanically to media coverage. They use it selectively to further their goals and
strengthen their position. Second, moving forward can be accomplished by
disaggregating the present research designs. Aggregate time series designs have been,
and continue to be, valuable instruments to establish the presence of agenda effects. Yet,
they are not well suited to refine the theory or to understand the precise mechanisms

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 21 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
linking media coverage with political adoption. We argue that future research should look
at individual elites, ideally using experimental designs or in-depth case studies. Third, as
the field is almost completely void of comparative studies, we do not have a lot to say
about whether the media matter more for the political agenda in some systems than in
others. We call for more studies that theorize country differences, focusing both on media
system and political system characteristics.
As data about media and political agendas become more readily available, we expect that
the work on the effect of media coverage on the political agenda will expand further. We
believe future work should invest in deepening and broadening our knowledge about the
media’s agenda power. We hope this article lays out a useful research program for the
years to come.
References
Ardıç, Ö., Annema, J. A., & van Wee, B. (2015). The reciprocal relationship between policy
debate and media coverage: The case of road pricing policy in the Netherlands.
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 78, 384–399.
Baumgartner, F., Breunig, C., Green-Pedersen, C., Jones, B. D., Mortensen, P. B.,
Nuytemans, M., & Walgrave, S. (2009). Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative
Perspective. American Journal of Political Science, 53(3), 603–620.
Baumgartner, F., De Boef, S. L., & Boydstun, A. E. (2008). The decline of the death
penalty and the discovery of innocence. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Baumgartner, F., & Jones, B. D. (1993). Agendas and instability in American politics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bennett, L. (1990). Toward a theory of press-state relations. Journal of Communication,
2(40), 103–125.
Birkland, T. (1998). Focusing events, mobilization, and agenda setting. Journal of Public
Policy, 18, 53–74.
Bonafont, L. C., & Baumgartner, F. R. (2013). Newspaper attention and policy activities
in Spain. Journal of Public Policy, 33(01), 65–88.
Budge, I., & Farlie, D. (1983). Party competition—Selective emphasis or direct
confrontation? An alternative view with data. In H. Daalder & P. Mair (Eds.), West
European party systems: Continuity and change (pp. 267–305). London: SAGE.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 22 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Davis, A. (2007). Investigating journalist influences on political issue agendas at
Westminster. Political Communication, 24(2), 181–199.
Delshad, A. B. (2012). Revisiting “who influences whom?” Agenda setting on biofuels.
Congress & the Presidency, 39(2), 177–198.
Deschouwer, K., & Depauw, S. (Eds.). (2014). Representing the people: A survey among
members of statewide and sub-state parliaments (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Downs, A. (1972). Up and down with ecology—The issue attention cycle. Public Interest,
28(winter), 38–50.
Eilders, C. (1997). The impact of editorial content on the political agenda in Germany:
Theoretical assumptions and open questions regarding a neglected subject in mass
communication research. WZB Discussion Papers, FS III, 97–102.
Elmelund-Præstekær, C., & Wien, C. (2008). What’s the fuss about? The interplay of
media hypes and politics. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 13(3), 247–266.
Eshbaugh-Soha, M., & Peake, J. S. (2005). Presidents and the economic agenda. Political
Research Quarterly, 58(1), 127–138.
Green-Pedersen, C., & Walgrave, S. (2014). Agenda setting, policies, and political
systems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Green-Pedersen, C., & Stubager, R. (2010). The political conditionality of mass media
influence. When do parties follow mass media attention? British Journal of Political
Science, 40, 663–677.
Groeling, T. (2013). Media bias by the numbers: Challenges and opportunities in the
empirical study of partisan news. Annual Review of Political Science, 16(1), 129–151.
Hallin, D., & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems: Three model of media and
politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Herbst, S. (1998). Reading public opinion. How political actors view the democratic
process. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Iyengar, S. (2001). The method is the message: The current state of political
communication research. Political Communication, 18(2), 225–229.
Jacobs, L., & Shapiro, R. (2000). Politicians don’t pander: Political manipulation and the
loss of democratic responsiveness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 23 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Jenner, E. (2012). News photographs and environmental agenda setting. Policy Studies
Journal, 40(2), 274–301.
Joly, J. (2014). Do the media influence foreign aid because or in spite of the bureaucracy?
A case study of Belgian aid determinants. Political Communication, 31(4), 584–603.
Jones, B., & Baumgartner, F. (2005). The politics of attention. How government
prioritizes attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jones, B., Sulkin, T., & Larsen, H. A. (2003). Policy punctuations in American political
institutions. American Political Science Review, 97(1), 151–169.
Jones, B., & Thomas, T. (2012). Bounded rationality and public policy decision-making. In
Michael Howlett, M. Ramesh, & Xun Wu (Eds.), Routledge handbook of public policy (pp.
273–286). London: Routledge.
Jones, B., & Wolfe, M. (2010). Public policy and the mass media: An information
processing approach. In S. Koch-Baumgarter & L. Voltmer (Eds.), Public policy and the
media: The interplay of mass communication and political decision making (pp. 17–43).
New York: Routledge.
Jones, B. D. (2003). Bounded rationality and political science: Lessons from public
administration and public policy. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory,
13(4), 395–412.
Katikireddi, S. V., & Hilton, S. (2015). How did policy actors use mass media to influence
the Scottish alcohol minimum unit pricing debate? Comparative analysis of newspapers,
evidence submissions, and interviews. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 22(2),
125–134.
Kingdon, J. W. (1984). Agendas, alternatives and public policies. New York:
HarperCollins.
Klingemann, H., Hofferbert, R., & Budge, I. (1994). Parties, policies, and democracy.
Oxford: Westview.
Lengauer, G., Donges, P., & Plasser, F. (2014). Perceptions of media power in politics. In
B. Pfetsch (Ed.), Political communication cultures in Western Europe: Attitudes of
political actors and journalists in nine countries (pp. 171–195). Basingstoke, U.K.:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Lengauer, G., Esser, F., & Berganza, R. (2012). Negativity in political news: A review of
concepts, operationalizations, and key findings. Journalism, 13(2), 179–202.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 24 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Maurer, P. (2011). Explaining perceived media influence in politics: An analysis of the
interplay of context and attitudes in four European democracies. Publizistik, 56, 27–50.
Melenhorst, L. (2015). The media’s role in lawmaking: A case study analysis. The
International Journal of Press/Politics, 20(3), 297–316.
Midtbø, T., Walgrave, S., Van Aelst, P., & Christensen, D. A. (2014). Do the media set the
agenda of parliament or is it the other way around? Agenda interactions between MPs
and mass media. In K. Deschouwer & S. Depauw (Eds.), Representing the people. A
survey among members of statewide and sub-state parliaments (pp. 188–208). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Miller, E. A., Nadash, P., & Goldstein, R. (2015). The role of the media in agenda setting:
The case of long-term care rebalancing. Home Health Care Services Quarterly, 34(1), 30–
45.
Neuman, W. R., Just, M. R., & Crigler, A. N. (1992). Common knowledge: News and the
construction of political meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Olds, C. (2013). Assessing presidential agenda-setting capacity: Dynamic comparisons of
presidential, mass media, and public attention to economic issues. Congress & the
Presidency, 40(3), 255–284.
Peake, J. S., & Eshbaugh-Soha, M. (2008). the agenda-setting impact of major
presidential tv addresses. Political Communication, 25(2), 113–137.
Petrocik, J. (1996). Issue ownership and presidential elections, with a 1980 case study.
American Journal of Political Science, 40(3), 825–850.
Pritchard, D., & Berkowitz, D. (1993). The limits of agenda setting: The press and
political responses to crime in the United States, 1950–1980. International Journal of
Public Opinion Research, 5(1), 86–91.
Roggeband, C., & Vliegenthart, R. (2007). Divergent framing: The public debate on
migration in the Dutch parliament and media, 1995–2004. West European Politics, 30(3),
524–548.
Rose, M., & Baumgartner, F. R. (2013). Framing the poor: Media coverage and U.S.
poverty policy, 1960–2008. Policy Studies Journal, 41(1), 22–53.
Schattschneider, E. E. (1960). the semi-sovereign people. New York: Holt.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 25 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Scheufele, D. A., & Tewksbury, D. (2007). Framing, agenda setting, and priming: The
evolution of three media effect models. Journal of Communication, 57, 2007.
Semetko, H., & Valkenburg, P. (2000). Framing European politics: A content analysis of
press and television news. Journal of Communication, 50(2), 93–109.
Sevenans, J., & Vliegenthart, R. (2015). Political agenda setting in Belgium and the
Netherlands: The moderating role of conflict framing. Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly, 83(1), 187–203.
Sevenans, J., Walgrave, S., & Epping, L. (2016). How political elites process
information from the news. A study of the cognitive mechanisms behind
behavioral political agenda-setting effects. Political Communication. Advance online
publication.
Sevenans, J., Walgrave, S., & Vos, D. (2015). Political elites’ media responsiveness
and their individual political goals: A study of national politicians in Belgium.
Research & Politics, 2(3).
Simon, H. (1985). Human nature in politics: The dialogue of psychology with political
science. The American Political Science Review, 79(2), 293–304.
Soroka, S. (2002). Issue attributes and agenda setting by media, the public, and
policymakers in Canada. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 14(3), 264–
285.
Soroka, S., & Wlezien, C. (2010). Degrees of democracy: Politics, public opinion and
policy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Tan, Y., & Weaver, D. H. (2007). Agenda-setting effects among the media, the public, and
congress, 1946–2004. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 84(4), 729–744.
Thesen, G. (2011). Attack and defend: Explaining party responses to news. Aarhus,
Denmark: Politica.
Thesen, G. (2013). When good news is scarce and bad news is good: Government
responsibilities and opposition possibilities in political agenda setting. European Journal
of Political Research, 52(3), 364–389.
Tieberghien, J. (2014). The role of the media in the science-policy nexus. Some critical
reflections based on an analysis of the Belgian drug policy debate (1996–2003).
International Journal of Drug Policy, 25(2), 276–281.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 26 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Tresch, A., Sciarini, P., & Varone, F. (2013). The relationship between media and political
agendas: Variations across decision-making phases. West European Politics, 36(5), 897–
918.
Valenzuela, S., & Arriagada, A. (2011). Politics without citizens? Public opinion, television
news, the president, and real-world factors in Chile, 2000–2005. The International Journal
of Press/Politics, 16(3), 357–381.
Van Aelst, P., & Vliegenthart, R. (2014). Studying the tango: An analysis of parliamentary
questions and press coverage in the Netherlands. Acta Politica, 15(4), 392–410.
Van Aelst, P., & Walgrave, S. (2011). Minimal or massive? The political agenda setting
power of the mass media according to different methods. International Journal of Press/
Politics, 16(3), 295–316.
Van Aelst, P., & Walgrave, S. (2016). Political agenda setting by the mass media. Ten
years of recent research (2005–2015). In N. Zahariadis (Ed.), Handbook of Public Policy
Agenda Setting. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edgar Elgar.
Van Dalen, A., & Van Aelst, P. (2014). The media as political agenda-setters: Journalists’
perceptions of media power in eight west European countries. West European Politics,
37(1), 42–64.
van der Pas, D. (2014). Making hay while the sun shines: Do parties only respond to
media attention when the framing is right? The International Journal of Press/Politics,
19(1), 42–65.
Van Noije, L., Kleinnijenhuis, J., & Oegema, D. (2008). Loss of parliamentary control due
to mediatization and Europeanization: A longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of
agenda building in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. British Journal of Political
Science, 38(3), 455–478.
van Santen, R., Helfer, L., & Van Aelst, P. (2015). When politics becomes news: An
analysis of parliamentary questions and press coverage in three West European
countries. Acta Politica, 50(1), 45–63.
Vliegenthart, R., & Montes, N. M. (2014). How political and media system characteristics
moderate interactions between newspapers and parliaments: Economic crisis attention in
Spain and the Netherlands. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 19(3), 318–339.
Vliegenthart, R., & Walgrave, S. (2011a). When media matter for politics: Partisan
moderators of mass media’s agenda-setting influence on Parliament in Belgium. Party
Politics, 17(3), 321–342.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 27 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016
Vliegenthart, R., & Walgrave, S. (2011b). Content matters: The dynamics of
parliamentary questioning in Belgium and Denmark. Comparative Political Studies, 44(8),
1031–1059.
Walgrave, S. (2008). Again the almighty mass media: A subjective assessment of the
media’s political agenda-setting power by politicians and journalists in Belgium. Political
Communication, 25(4), 445–459.
Walgrave, S., Soroka, S., & Nuytemans, M. (2008). The mass media’s political agenda-
setting power. A longitudinal analysis of media, parliament and government in Belgium
(1993–2000). Comparative Political Studies, 41(6), 814–836.
Walgrave, S., & Van Aelst, P. (2006). The contingency of the mass media’s political
agenda setting power: Towards a preliminary theory. Journal of Communication, 56(1),
88–109.
Walgrave, S., & Vliegenthart, R. (2012). The complex agenda-setting power of protest:
Demonstrations, media, parliament, government, and legislation in Belgium (1993–2000).
Mobilization, 17(2), 129–156.
Weaver, D. (1977). Political issues and voter need for orientation. In D. Shaw & M.
McCombs (Eds.), The emergence of American political issues: The agenda-setting
function of the press (pp. 107–120). New York: West.
Wolfe, M., Jones, B. D., & Baumgartner, F. R. (2013). A failure to communicate: Agenda
setting in media and policy studies. Political Communication, 30(2), 175–192.
Wolfsfeld, G., & Sheafer, T. (2006). Competing actors and the construction of political
news: The contest over waves in Israel. Political Communication, 23(3), 333–354.
Stefaan Walgrave
Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp
Peter Van Aelst
Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media
Page 28 of 28
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICS (politics.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press
USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy
and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Subscriber: null; date: 15 December 2016