Assessing Presidential Agenda-Setting Capacity: Dynamic Comparisons of Presidential, Mass Media, and Public Attention to Economic Issues

Abstract

Research on presidential agenda setting has rarely attempted to simultaneously assess the ability of the president to influence the policy agendas of the mass media and the public. This is primarily due to the lack of time-refined measures of public issue attention.With advances in technology, information about Internet search engine behavior can provide an indication of the level of interest the public has over time about specific issues. Using Google Trends weekly data about public search interest levels, this project contrasts dynamic attention to several economic issues: unemployment, recession, and inflation. The vector autoregression analyses performed suggest the president does not have the capacity to directly guide public attention, nor does the president have the capacity to indirectly guide public attention through the media. There is some indication that the president can indirectly guide public attention by influencing actual economic conditions, and that the president is responsive to attention from the mass media and the public. The moving-average representation analyses indicate that an increase in presidential attention has the potential to produce a small contemporaneous increase in either mass media or public attention to some economic issues. The duration of these positive shifts in mass media or public attention are all very brief, indicating the president has a limited capacity through either direct or indirect leadership to sustain the attention other actors in the political system place on the specific issues studied. Strong evidence in all three of the issue areas studied supports that mass media attention and public attention are closely related.

Parliamentary Questions, Newspaper Coverage, and Consumer Confidence in Times of Crisis: A Cross-National Comparison

“…Jones and Baumgartner (2005) point to the agenda-setting power of the U.S. President. By paying attention to certain issues at the expense of other issues, the incumbent is capable of setting the systemic agenda-that is, affecting the issues deemed important by a majority of the people (Kernell, 2006;Olds, 2013). When these issues are inherently negative, as is the case in the current study's design, higher levels of parliamentary attention carry the potential of shifting public attitudes.…”

One concept, many interpretations: the media’s causal roles in political agenda-setting processes

“…On the one hand, we think 'traditional' agenda-setting methods (time-series) could be improved as to better control for spurious relationships and endogeneity. A first step in the good direction is, for instance, made by authors as Liu et al (2011), Delshad (2012, and Olds (2013), who look for detailed measurements of 'alternative' information streams available to politicians; or by Thesen (2013) and Van Aelst and Vliegenthart (2013), who try to distinguish exogenous from endogenous news by means of detailed content analyses. On the other hand, we advocate the use of political elite research to study agenda setting, both in quantitative (surveys, experiments) and qualitative (interviews) ways.…”

“…Representation : Politicians are not only ‘policymakers’; they are also ‘representatives’ in the sense that they view it as their task to represent the preferences of the public, or more specifically, their voters (Page and Shapiro, 1983). Many scholars in the field of media and politics refer to the idea that the media’s agenda-setting impact is driven by the media’s relationship with the public opinion.…”

To whom does the agenda belong? Review of issue ownership theory

“…Постоянное присутствие в информационном пространстве позволяет ему в значительной степени определять основные темы публичной дискуссии [Cohen, 1995]. Высказывания, а самое главное -действия главы государства [Olds, 2013], могут формировать общественную повестку дня. Иными словами, президент не только говорит о том, что важно для людей, он также формирует представления населения о важном.…”