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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. 17–42

Media, public opinion and parliamentary agendas’ effect in political parties’ agenda-setting

| ISCTE-IUL, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

Why do parties pay more attention to some policy issues than to others? To what extent does policy attention conveyed by the media, public opinion, and parliament explain party agenda-setting? And, more specifically, to what extent does the media agenda influence other agenda effects? This paper addresses these questions in an original manner by analyzing the influence of these three agendas – media, public opinion, and parliament – in party manifesto elaboration. The analysis relies on an extensive database of the Portuguese Policy Agendas Project that includes media attention, voter preferences, parliamentary questions and pledges in manifestos, between 1995 and 2015. Our findings show that the media agenda is the most influential in party manifesto elaboration, and that the other agendas have a stronger effect when the media also give attention to the issue. This depends, however, on the political party being in cabinet or in opposition, as well as on the economic context. These findings have important implications for party competition literature.

Keywords: policy attention, political parties, media attention, public preferences, parliamentary questions, party manifestos, Portugal
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature and hypotheses
    • Issue attention in party manifestos
    • Media agenda
    • Public opinion agenda
    • Parliamentary agenda
    • Comparing political agenda effects in manifesto issue attention
    • Political parties as a contingent factor of media effect
    • The economic context as a contingent factor of media effect
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Data sources
    • 3.2Modeling the influence of the media, the public and parliamentary agendas in party manifesto elaboration
  • 4.Policy attention in Portugal: Comparing agendas
  • 5.Analyzing the influence of the media, public opinion and parliamentary agendas in party manifesto elaboration
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/asj.19008.bel
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