Agenda-Setting in a Comparative Perspective

A resurgence of interest in agenda-setting is underway in political science. While agenda-setting used to be mainly studied within the field of public policy, it is now gradually becoming a key approach in comparative politics, party studies, political communication, legislative studies etc. The basic ideas underlying all these studies is that policy problems are in infinite supply, that attention to political issues is scarce due to the limited information-processing capacities of individuals and institutions, and that any policy change and decision making require preceding political attention. The key issue is then: why are political actors/institutions devoting attention to some issues while ignoring many others? The main driver of political attention, agenda-setting scholars claim, is incoming information. Political actors and institutions must prioritise and act upon a staggering amount of information when determining which policy issues to address. Together with the upsurge in interest in agenda-setting, political science has witnessed a boom in studies gathering longitudinal data on the agendas of parties, media, governments, parliaments, presidents etc. These data provide an opportunity for political scientists to reevaluate many of our established arguments about the role of institutions, political parties, and elections in democratic systems from a new perspective and with new cross-national data. The comparative role of the media, citizenry, political parties, and real world cues in driving divergent patterns of policy attention and action in different institutional contexts is now an empirically tractable subject of study both at the system level, and in individual policy domains. This section invites papers with theoretical and empirical contributions that advance the examination of these issues in the study of comparative agenda-setting, information processing, and policy making.