Agendas and Political Organizations: Why only Some Issues are Organized into Politics

The political system cannot resolve all potential conflicts in a given society and this means that ‘some issues are organized into politics whereas others are organized out’ (Schattschneider, 1960, 69). Agenda-setting occurs when issues are prioritised by parties, interest groups and social movements, and become part of the formal agenda of government. Some issues are more likely to arise via certain organizations and not others. This means that, depending on circumstances, the party, interest group and social movement agendas accumulate or complement each other. This matters a lot: a wider range of issues will be voiced in case these organizations present their own issues (compensate) rather than all focus on the same type of issues (accumulate). At the same time, issues may be more likely to reach government agenda-status when the agendas of political parties, interest groups and social movements are similar. In other words, (1) why do the agendas of political parties, interest groups and social movements overlap on some issues but not on others? And (2)do issues on which the agendas overlap receive more serious government attention than others? Scholars of political parties are able to identify the issues set on the agenda by political parties, interest group researchers have a broad idea of the issues typically pushed onto the government agenda by interest groups and social movement scholars know about the issues of concern to movements. We do not know how these agendas are related to each other and, jointly, to the formal decision-making agenda of national government. The relationships between the agendas of different forms of political organizations are notoriously difficult to study because they require theoretical embedding in distinct sub-fields of political science and relatively complex research designs. This means that, despite its central position in theories of representation and democracy more broadly, our knowledge on the relationships between the agendas of political parties, interest groups and social movements is scattered, incomplete and largely inconclusive (but see recent studies: Allern and Bale 2012; Bolleyer, 2013; Hutter and Vliegenthart, 2016; Klüver, 2016). This paper discusses recent and classic studies in the respective subfield and identifies fruitful areas for future study.