After having convincingly showed that the extent to which media coverage influences the issue priorities of policy-makers is contingent on factors such as the type of media and political agenda, and issues, the literature on the media's agenda-setting power has started to look at the role of partisan moderators (party size, government or opposition status, issue ownership).
In this paper, we joint this recent literature and we look at partisan moderators of the media's agenda-setting power in Switzerland. At a first glance, Switzerland is a hard case with respect to partisan moderators in general, and to the distinction between government and opposition in particular. First, in a country where direct democracy and power sharing mechanisms are strongly developed, partisan politics is overall not said to matter much. Second, in the Swiss consensus democracy all main political parties are represented in government, and the distinction between government and opposition does not make much sense. On closer inspection, however, partisan politics has substantially reinforced during the last two decades. In addition, in the Swiss system votes of confidence and coalition agreements between parties do not exist. Therefore, parties may play the double game of government and opposition. Two parties, in particular, tend to play such a game: The Social democrats and the Swiss people's party. This raises the question whether these two parties are overall more reactive to the media than the other two governing parties, and this especially with respect to their core issues?
Empirically, we rely on time-series cross section of monthly data on issue attention in parliament (initiatives/motions, questions/interpellations) and in the media (articles in the Neue-Zürcher-Zeitung), 1995-2003. In addition to partisan moderators, we are also interested in variations across political agendas (substantial/ symbolic) and across media agendas (articles dealing with politics/policy-making).
