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Article published In:
Mass Media Effects and the Political Agenda: Assessing its Scope and Conditions
Edited by Ana Maria Belchior, Peter Van Aelst, José Santana-Pereira and Patrick Merle
[The Agenda Setting Journal 4:1] 2020
► pp. 109–134

Political agenda-setting and -building in small consensus democracies

Relationships between media and parliament in the Netherlands and Switzerland

| University of Geneva
| University of Lausanne
| University of Amsterdam

This paper analyzes the mutual influence between media and political agendas in the Netherlands and Switzerland. While these two countries share a number of similarities, they also exhibit some important differences (e.g. the frequency of parliamentary meetings) that are likely to affect the patterns of influence. Time-series cross-section analyses of monthly data about issue attention in parliamentary questions and in media coverage for the period 1995–2003 (Switzerland) and 1995–2011 (Netherlands) provide partial support for our hypotheses. Agenda-setting and -building effects are overall stronger in Switzerland, which may be due to differences in the workings of national parliaments and varying degrees of mediatization. Moreover, our analyses reveal more pronounced differences between the coalition and opposition parties in Switzerland. Overall, this study demonstrates that it is important to consider smaller institutional differences when studying political agenda-setting and -building in a cross-national perspective.

Keywords: political agenda-setting, agenda-building, comparative agenda’s project, time series analysis, parliament, newspapers, Switzerland, the Netherlands
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • The conditionality of agenda-setting and agenda-building effects
    • Similar, but different: The media-politics nexus in the Netherlands and Switzerland
    • Political and media system characteristics as moderators of agenda-setting and -building effects
  • Data and model
  • Results
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/asj.19004.sci
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