Agenda Setting Policies And Political Systems

What will gain the system’s attention? “Explores the dynamics of a broad range of policy issues in different countries . . . an important scholarly contribution.” —Political Studies Review Before making significant policy decisions, political actors and parties must first craft an agenda designed to place certain issues at the center of political attention. The agenda-setting approach in political science holds that the amount of attention devoted by the various actors within a political system to issues like immigration, health care, and the economy can inform our understanding of its basic patterns and processes. While there has been considerable attention to how political systems process issues in the United States, Christoffer Green-Pedersen and Stefaan Walgrave demonstrate the broader applicability of this approach by extending it to other countries and their political systems. This book brings together essays on eleven countries and two broad themes. Contributors to the first section analyze the extent to which party and electoral changes and shifts in the partisan composition of government have led—or not led—to policy changes in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and France. The second section turns the focus on changing institutional structures in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Canada, including the German reunification and the collapse of the Italian party system. Together, the essays make clear the efficacy of the agenda-setting approach for understanding not only how policies evolve, but also how political systems function.

Building on hundreds of thousands of systematically collected and content-coded local policy agenda observations, this book examines – theoretically and empirically - the policy agenda effects of four central aspects of any political system: the institutions that structure politics; the problems confronting the political system; the occurrence of regular and free elections; and the actors navigating the political system. Developing an explanatory model based on these four factors not only improves our understanding of the determinants of the local policy agenda but also contributes to a further integration of local government research, policy agendas research, and the broader discipline of political science. The book may be of particular interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, agenda setting, public policy, and local government.

Setting the agenda on agenda setting, this Handbook explores how and why private matters become public issues and occasionally government priorities. It provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of the perspectives, individuals, and institutions involved in setting the government’s agenda at subnational, national, and international levels. Drawing on contributions from leading academics across the world, this Handbook is split into five distinct parts. Part one sets public policy agenda setting in its historical context, devoting chapters to more in-depth studies of the main individual scholars and their works. Part two offers an extensive examination of the theoretical development, whilst part three provides a comprehensive look at the various institutional dimensions. Part four reviews the literature on sub-national, national and international governance levels. Finally, part five offers innovative coverage on agenda setting during crises.

Previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy, this book draws on the insights of the existing literature on agenda setting and policy changes to explore the dynamics of attention allocation and its consequences. Attention is a crucial variable in understanding modern politics. Shifts in attention have dramatic consequences for both politics and policy decisions. This volume includes case studies of nine different political systems including the US, Canada, several European systems, and the EU itself. It asks the following questions: Which are the dynamics of agenda-setting in the EU? Which role do political parties play in attention allocation? What are the cross national differences in attention to health care? What role does science and expertise play in attention-allocation? What are the effects of political institutions? Comparative Studies of Policy Agendas will be of interest to students and scholars of policy analysis and public policy.

Why do public issues like the environment rise and fall in importance over time? To what extent can the trends in salience be explained by real-world factors? To what degree are they the product of interactions between media content, public opinion, and policymaking? This book surveys the development of eight issues in Canada over a decade -- AIDS, crime, the debt/deficit, the environment, inflation, national unity, taxes, and unemployment -- to explore how the salience of issues changes over time, and to examine why these changes are important to our understanding of everyday politics. Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada offers one of the first empirical analyses of the interaction of the media, the public, and policymakers in Canada and, more generally, makes an important contribution to the study of political communications and policymaking well beyond the Canadian context.

This book summarizes recent advances in the work on agenda-setting in a comparative perspective. The book first presents and explains the data-gathering effort undertaken within the Comparative Agendas Project over the past ten years. Individual country chapters then present the research undertaken within the many national projects. The third section illustrates the possibilities and directions for new research in comparative public policy using the data presented in this book. All the data used and discussed in the book is moreover publicly available. The book represents a significant contribution to the study of comparative public policy. By introducing a unified research infrastructure it opens up new possibilities for both empirical and theoretical research in this area.

Over the past thirty years the comparative study of policy agendas under the aegis of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has become one of the fastest growing sub-field in policy research. Yet, similarly to policy studies in general, most of the agenda-setting literature focuses on well-established democracies. This edited volume offers a ground-breaking analysis of a hitherto less examined topic in comparative politics: the dynamics of policy agendas in Socialist autocracy and in hybrid regimes. We propose that policymaking in authoritarian and illiberal regimes is different from the practices of democracies which we analyse based on a unique historical policy agendas database built by the Hungarian CAP team at the Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. We find that punctuated equilibrium theory offers a good description of policy dynamics regardless of policy regimes, yet punctuations are more pronounced in autocratic and illiberal settings. These regime types also share a tendency towards centralization, a less efficient use of public information and a suppression of democratic participation in the policy process. This book may be of interest to scholars and students of policy studies, agenda-setting and the politics of authoritarianism.

New communication technologies have reshaped media and politics. But who are the new power players? The Hybrid Media System shows how the interactions among older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms now shape power relations among political actors, media, and publics.