The political agenda-setting power of the media: the Europeanization nexus

Abstract:

Previous studies have demonstrated that the extent to which media coverage influences the issue priorities of policy-makers is contingent on the type of issues, media, and political agendas. This article contributes to this literature by elaborating on a factor that has been surprisingly neglected so far: the domestic or Europeanized character of the political issue covered in the news.

Empirically, we apply time-series cross-section analyses to a dataset on media and parliamentary agendas during the years 1995–2003 in Switzerland. We find that the media’s political agenda-setting power mainly stems from news coverage of domestic issues. News on Europeanized issues have a weak impact on so-called symbolic parliamentary agendas, and no impact at all on the more substantial parliamentary agendas that may initiate decision-making processes.