Issue Attributes and Agenda‐Setting by Media, the Public, and Policymakers in Canada

Agenda-setting hypotheses inform research on both media influence and policy making. The study draws from these two literatures, building a more accurate and comprehensive model of the expanded agenda-setting process. Evidence is derived from a longitudinal dataset, including a content analysis of Canadian newspapers, results from public opinion polls, and measures of attention to issues in Question Period, committees, Throne Speeches, and legislative initiatives from  to . A model is estimated that accommodates dynamic, multi-directional effects. Findings are presented for three issues—inflation, environment, and debt/deficit—with an eye on examining different agenda-setting dynamics, and the degree to which these dynamics are linked to issue attributes. The results () demonstrate the value of an agenda-setting framework and a means of modelling media effects and the policy making process, and () indicate the importance of taking issue attributes into account in predicting or accounting for agenda-setting effects. Relationships between mass media, the public, and policymakers are at the centre of both political communications and everyday politics. These interactions reach into a wide range of research interests, including the media’s role in the formation of public opinion and public policy, and the degree to which public policy follows or leads public opinion. Abstractly, we might reflect on the wider implications these relationships have for democratic theory or institutional development. Concretely, we might consider what they tell us about day-to-day This article was first submitted to IJPOR April , . The final version was received July , . The author wishes to thank Richard Johnston, Byron Shafer, and the Journal’s anonymous referees for their comments on previous versions of this paper, Donald Blake, Bryan Jones, Richard Jenkins, and Patrick Fournier for their helpful comments on related work, and William Veloce and Lewis Soroka for their help with economic and statistical matters. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided support for this research in the form of a doctoral fellowship. Public opinion data analysed within were made available by the University of British Columbia Numeric Data Services, the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen’s University, and the Carleton University Data Centre. None of these institutions or individuals bears any responsibility for errors or omissions in the final product.  World Association for Public Opinion Research                 interactions between newspapers, television, citizens, politicians, and bureaucrats. That these topics are typically examined only in part is no surprise, considering the scope of the territory covered. An agenda-setting framework offers the possibility of looking concurrently at a wide range of political relationships, however, and of empirically mapping political communications at the societal level. Admittedly, agenda-setting research has rarely capitalized on this potential. Work on public agenda-setting has seldom drawn from policy agenda-setting research, and vice versa. Nevertheless, past work suggests that agenda-setting models are capable of accommodating both media-public dynamics and the relationships between these actors and the policy process. The paper that follows represents one attempt at doing exactly this. It is based on data for three issues from Canada, but the model is easily adapted to any issue in any democracy. Policy measures will likely change with different governing institutions, of course, as will media-public-policy relationships. But the general tenets upon which this research is based—the value of an agenda-setting framework, a statistical model of the expanded agenda-setting process, and an acknowledged relationship between agenda-setting dynamics and issue attributes—are described here with the expectation that they are valuable beyond the Canadian examples used below. We begin with a brief review of public and policy agenda-setting research. This body of research is considerable, as are its contributions to political science and communications. Nevertheless, the literature has remained splintered and is often beleaguered by methodological difficulties. Some of these difficulties are described below, and a new model and measures are presented with the aim both of uniting the vast bodies of past public and policy agenda-setting work, and of better accommodating dynamic, multi-directional relationships. This model is then estimated for three issues in Canada—inflation, environment, and debt/deficit. Results are discussed as they pertain to the Canadian experience in particular and, more generally, to the agenda-setting framework and the connection between issue attributes and issue dynamics. AGENDA-SETTING: PROBLEMS AND POTENTIAL Agenda-setting research focuses not on issue opinions, per se, but on issue salience. Cohen was the first to state what has become the central public agenda-setting hypothesis: the press ‘may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about’ (Cohen , p. ). Following from Cohen’s discussion, public agenda-setting work demonstrates that increased issue salience for the media leads to increased issue salience for the public—in agenda-setting terms, that the media agenda has an impact on the public agenda, where an                agenda is a ‘ranking of the relative importance of various public issues’ (Dearing , p. ). McCombs and Shaw’s () study stands as the first empirical public agenda-setting study; well over  have followed in their footsteps. Cobb and Elder (), meanwhile, have used a similar framework to examine public policy formation. Subsequent policy agenda-setting studies examine relationships between media and policy, as well as public and policy agendas. Studies by Kingdon () and Baumgartner and Jones () represent the current state of this line of research; in their consideration of public opinion, in fact, Baumgartner and Jones’ work stands as one of the few recent policy-oriented studies to draw from both the public and policy agenda-setting traditions. The combination of empirical work on public opinion and on public policy is long overdue; recent efforts include only half-hearted attempts to build models using both public opinion and policy measures. Nevertheless, it is clear that effects of/on the public and of/on policymakers are intimately connected, and the most significant advantage of an agenda-setting framework is its ability—through the use of a common vernacular and directly comparable measures—to combine mass media analysis, public opinion research, and studies of the policymaking process. In this way, agenda-setting work is uniquely qualified to offer empirical accounts of political communications at the societal level. A central goal of the current work is to demonstrate this fact, by making an explicit effort to combine public opinionand policy-oriented agenda-setting analysis, and by building a model that empirically links media, public, and policy agendas. Combining disparate literatures on agenda-setting is the first goal of this project; recognizing and accommodating for the fact that different issues will have different agenda-setting dynamics is the second. Different issues have led to markedly different agenda-setting results, after all, and recent work suggests that the direction of media-public, media-policy, and public-policy relationships vary both across issues and over time (Brosius and Kepplinger , Gonzenbach , Soroka a). Different hypotheses have been offered to account for this varied evidence. Some is due simply to methodological differences—measures of agendas and means of analysis have varied widely. Issue attributes also play a role, however. Zucker’s () ‘obtrusiveness’ hypothesis is perhaps the bestknown issue attribute theory: he suggests that the more obtrusive an issue is—the more likely individuals experience it directly—the less potential there is for media effects on public opinion. Other authors have suggested additional hypotheses: () ‘concrete’ issues should be more open to media effects than 1 For thorough reviews of the agenda-setting literature, see Dearing and Rogers (), McCombs and Shaw (), and Rogers et al. (). 2 There is no equivalent review of the policy agenda-setting literature, although some of it is covered in the public agenda-setting reviews. For a representative sample of work on the USA—other than those mentioned above—see Mayer (), Page and Shapiro (, ), Pritchard (), and Wanta et al. (); for work on Canada, see Howlett (, ) and Soroka (b, ).                ‘abstract’ issues (Yagade and Dozier ); () the public has a limited attention span, so issues that are salient for a long period will eventually offer less opportunity for media impact (Downs , Zucker ); () issues that involve dramatic events or conflict should have an increased potential for media attention and effects on public opinion (MacKuen and Coombs , Wanta and Hu ). In spite of their potential for accounting for (and predicting) variation in agenda-setting effects, hypotheses about the role of issue attributes in agenda-setting have received only intermittent attention in the public agendasetting literature. Moreover, they have tended to deal more with the media-public link than with links between these and policy agendas. In fact, no effort has been made to test hypotheses regarding the role of issue attributes in the larger agenda-setting process. Accordingly, three issues—inflation, environment, and debt/deficit—are examined below with an eye toward