AGENDA SETTING

THE activities of the media have come under scrutiny since the December 7, 2008 general election for very obvious reasons. The media play a very critical role in setting the agenda.
Reviewing the activities of journalists during the Unilever Ghana Limited/Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) annual soiree in Accra last Friday, the Chief Executive of Unilever, Mr Charles A. Cofie, said, “Given that by the nature of your profession you are entrusted with empowering the citizenry to make informed decisions, it is imperative that you relentlessly pursue fairness and truth in your reportage.”
This advice comes shortly after the elections, particularly the run-off, when certain media houses pitted brother against sister just on account that they belonged to different political persuasions. Indeed, during that time keen observers of the media scene had cause to worry about the blatant abuse of the code of ethics of journalism.
Media practitioners question the competence and integrity of all public office holders without being accountable to anybody. The media have become so powerful in recent times that some commentators conclude that the freedom of press and of expression guaranteed by the Constitution has led to the tyranny of the media.
It is generally agreed that a free press is the tool of public criticism. It holds public officials accountable, opening them up to the judgement of people who can decide whether the government is doing good or whether it has anything to hide.
Article 162 Clause 5 of the Constitution states that “All agencies of the mass media shall, at all times, be free to uphold the principles, provisions and objectives of this Constitution and shall uphold the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people of Ghana.”
This provision imposes a heavy responsibility on all journalists to act as watchdogs of the actions of public officials.
Unfortunately, sometimes some media practitioners abuse this responsibility imposed on them by the Constitution and engage in acts that are not protected by the laws of the land.
We recall again Mr Cofie’s admonition to the media when he asked, “Is it not painful that the great job some of you sought to do during the general election was marred by the bizarre distortion of facts, broadcast of false information and the undue fuelling of passions by others?”
Other professionals have questioned the moral authority of media practitioners to hold public office holders accountable when such values and principles are missing in the discharge of duty by certain journalists, even including trained ones.
Mr Cofie then put the question, “And would it not be a tragedy if you, whom we trust to lead us in the right path, often expect us to do as you say but not as you do?”
There is still believes in the power of the media to help the people to make informed decisions.
The time has come for the media, particularly its professional body, the GJA, to intensify continuing education of its members and those who do not belong to the association to compel them to respect the ethics, values and principles of the profession.
Great men like Thomas Jefferson had so much faith in the media because of their power to change society for the better. That was why, confronted with his preference for government or media, he declared, “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
There is a call on all media practitioners to resolve to respect their code of ethics and other best practices in order to continue to earn the respect of the public to inform them.
A democratic and free society is dependent on the ability of the media to inform. But if we allow public resentment for the media to mount because we have become “Jacks of all trades but masters of none”, interest groups from politics, the business community and the clergy will gang up to curtail media freedoms.
Let us, therefore, demonstrate to the people we serve that we shall exercise the freedom guaranteed in the Constitution with responsibility.
We should bear in mind that no society makes progress in a state of nature. The press will continue to provide a forum for public debate and public scrutiny of government if journalists respect the cardinal principles of fairness, accuracy and balance in their reportage.
The Chief Justice, Mrs Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, at the weekend called on the media to play their role in ensuring credible elections in December.
For her, the need for journalists to live up to their role as neutral referees was crucial and a precondition for successful polls.
So important is the media’s role that the Chief Justice described as “awesome” their task of educating the electorate to help them to make wise political decisions and not to prejudge the issues.
Her call to practitioners of the noble profession, which has become known as the Fourth Estate of the Realm, at a dinner packed with journalists, media practitioners and corporate organisations to celebrate excellence in journalism is, indeed, very welcome.
Her appeal to the media comes at a time when the electioneering has gathered steam, with pockets of election- related violence already being reported in some areas of the country.
Rightly so, journalists have a crucial role in shaping opinions and empowering the voting public with information with which to make informed decisions.
The fourth President of the United States, James Madison, an ardent promoter of free press and free society, once noted that “knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives”.
The ancient historian, William Bernbach, also noted that “all of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level”.
The freedom that has been accorded the media needs to be used responsibly, as there is no absolute freedom. Everybody in society identifies with the media in one way or another and anything the media churns out is likely to make an impact, either negatively or positively, on different segments of society.
It is for this reason that the state endorses the Chief Justice’s call on the media to play a leading and responsible role in the run up, during and after the December polls.
There is no better time than now for the media to show their readiness to promote peace, reconciliation and development and there is yet no better journalism than development journalism in which even the bleakest incidents, events and behaviours are looked at and shaped from a development perspective.
This will mean that every act of the media will be guided by the overriding interest of promoting the cause of the larger society, a fair balance of exercising responsibility in freedom.
The Uruguayan journalist, Eduardo Galeano, describes the media as something that symbolises the community’s favourite way of dreaming, living, dancing, playing or loving, and if we may add, “of voting”.
It is only proper for the media to aspire to promote national peace and stability through the use of temperate and refined language.
It is commended that the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) for using the awards ceremony platform to drum support for efforts by other organisations to sensitise the electorate to the need for free and fair polls.
With a few weeks to the highly anticipated polls on December 7, all Ghanaians are encouraged to play their roles as responsible citizens, and in this national assignment the media cannot afford to distort the peace with irresponsible reportage.
We believe members of the media fraternity are ready to join peace-loving Ghanaians to work towards successful elections that will establish Ghana as a model democratic state in Africa.
With 40 days to go for the December polls, the Electoral Commission (EC) has declared its readiness to conduct free and fair elections, after taking delivery of essential materials for the elections.
The commission, according to media reports, has taken delivery of indelible ink, endorsing ink, validation stamps, stamp pads, thumbprint pads, ballot boxes and materials for the printing of ballot papers.
The Fourth Republic has already witnessed four elections and the EC has played a key role in making those elections successful.
The commission has demonstrated that it has the character and professionalism to appropriately deal with the competing demands from the various political parties.
Even on occasions when it has been unfairly condemned and criticised, it has refused to crumble under pressure.
As the nation draws closer to the December polls, political campaigns are getting heated and politicians are making last minute efforts to woo voters and improve their chances of winning the elections.
In the heat of these campaigns, some politicians make utterances that tend to question the integrity and fairness of the EC, even when such accusations are baseless and cannot be substantiated. It is becoming quite evident that the EC is sometimes unfairly drawn into the politics of the day.
While the DAILY GRAPHIC does not intend to hold brief for the EC in any matter, it is the belief of the paper that the commission has demonstrated that it is capable of staying above partisanship and conducting its business in an objective and credible manner.
Thus any attempt to characterise the EC as a politically bias entity could serve as a potent distraction to the conduct of free and fair elections.
That is why the DAILY GRAPHIC calls on politicians to guard their utterances and ensure that they avoid casting the EC in a bad light and, thereby, erode the confidence of the electorate in it.
Interestingly, some politicians who are always quick to chastise the EC are actually the very people who have been implicated in one shameful electoral malpractice or another.
As has been duly acknowledged by all the political parties, the conduct of free and fair elections is not the responsibility of only the commission but also all Ghanaians, including political parties, the judiciary, the media, the security agencies and the electorate.
At the recent meeting between the Council of State and representatives of political parties, the issue of the unfair criticism and condemnation of the EC came up and some party representatives cautioned against the tendency of some of their colleagues to deride the commission.
We are happy that some political parties and politicians have recognised the potential harm such unhealthy characterisation of the EC can do to it and ultimately to our young democracy.
It is, therefore, the hope of the DAILY GRAPHIC that this recognition will find greater practical expression and save the EC from any further unfair bashing.
We also wish to encourage the EC to continuously live above reproach and maintain or even improve the high standards set over the years.
The confidence of the people can only be sustained if the EC refuses to bow to any pressure from any quarter and rather rededicates itself to the ideals required for free and fair elections.
YESTERDAY, Ghanaians affirmed their belief in multi-party democracy when they turned out massively to vote for their presidential and parliamentary candidates in a peaceful and orderly manner.
The polls were a landmark national exercise and had been preceded by months of heated political campaigns and debates with some wild speculations that the heat may be too intense to contain on election day.
And, with the rest of the world closely watching us, we, as a peace-loving people, have demonstrated that we are not only determined to consolidate the gains made so far on our democratic journey, but also committed to maintaining our position as a shining example on the continent.
We have confirmed Ghana as a democratic country, which is offering hope to the continent and our conduct yesterday was a positive way of trying to redeem Africa’s image.
Indeed, apart from isolated cases of misunderstandings and physical aggression, there is a lot to commend ourselves for and it will not be in the least misplaced to remark that this is one of the best elections in the country since 1992.
All over the country it was evident that Ghanaians are more than ever enthralled by multi-party democracy which offers the opportunity for the conduct of periodic elections to select those who will represent the best path towards the future.
The Electoral Commission (EC), security agencies, various political parties and candidates, the media, civil society organisations and the electorate all need to be commended for their role in ensuring peaceful and orderly polls.
While we celebrate the peaceful and orderly nature of yesterday’s polls, the DAILY GRAPHIC, wishes to stress the need for all Ghanaians to stay religiously committed to the ideals that inspired us to turn out in our numbers to vote yesterday and not to sacrifice those values and virtues at the expense of personal gain.
The massive turnout devoid of the pre-election tension teaches one lesson — that through collaborative efforts, we can find solutions to the challenges that confront us.
We remind the electorate of the challenges of the post-election thrills and disappointment after the declaration of validated results. If these difficulties are not properly managed, our celebrations can be short-lived as the trouble makers can create doubts in the minds of the people about the credibility of the polls.
However, it is the belief of the DAILY GRAPHIC that the transparent nature of the polls will be a deterrent to anyone who may choose the path of violence to address whatever concerns that may emerge.
It is important that as a people, we recognise that whatever our political differences and ethnic origins we are first and foremost Ghanaians. We cannot pursue our political interests at the expense of national unity and cohesion and our post-election demeanour and behaviour must constantly radiate our faith in a united Ghana.
When the results are announced we must immediately forget about whatever happened in the course of the electioneering and rally behind the next government to build a highly developed and prosperous country that can meet the dreams and aspirations of the people.
A government of the people, for the people and by the people should in essence harness whatever potential is available irrespective of the political affiliation of the individual who has demonstrated ample competence and has requisite qualification for the task ahead.
In that respect, the DAILY GRAPHIC believes that the next government will be an all-inclusive administration so that we can all share in the benefits of democratic governance.
LAST Sunday, Ghanaians demonstrated beyond doubt that they are a peace-loving people and that democracy is gradually becoming a prominent feature of the country’s political culture.
The inability of any of the presidential candidates to secure more than 50 per cent votes in the presidential election in order to be declared President, as required by the 1992 Constitution, has necessitated a run-off scheduled for December 28, this year.
Now that the presidential bid has been narrowed to only two contestants, there is great temptation for the candidates and their political parties to use every means possible, including reducing the campaign to mudslinging, personality attacks, as well as playing the tribal card, to win the contest at all cost.
It is to prevent such a possible development that the call by a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, Mr Kingsley Adjei, on leaders of political parties to desist from using the tribal card to canvass for votes during the electioneering for the run-off is most appropriate.
The use of a tribal card in an election or nation-building can pose a threat to national unity and civility and be inimical to progress. Again, such an approach can engender divide-and-rule tactics and discrimination and feed into the psyche of the electorate the dangerous mindset of “us and them”.
The events which took place in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone which led to the death of countless people and injury to thousands others should be a constant reminder of the negative effects of using the tribal card for political expediency.
The callous slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in a record period of three months between April and June 1994 was not only shocking and mind boggling but also left many people across countries in the world reeling in disbelief. In the case of Rwanda, the media were used as part of the grand design to perpetrate such atrocities.
The Ghanaian media performed creditably in last Sunday’s elections and we are hopeful that the practitioners will continue to play their gate-keeping role to prevent any situation where they can be used as agents of ethnic politics by politicians.
Elections are not a life-and-death issue. Rather, they are a democratic process of taking a decision and exercising one’s preferences for the ideas and programmes presented by a candidate and a party through the ballot box.
We, sincerely, believe that the two candidates and their teeming supporters will continue to conduct their campaigns devoid of acrimony, rancour and bitterness.
The political parties should continue to be modest in their electioneering and refrain from the use of abusive and intemperate language which can inflame passions. Again, it is our expectation that the electorate, the Electoral Commission and the security personnel will once again rise up to the task and live up to the expectation of organising a transparent peaceful election.
We should not do anything to mar the beauty of our development process by playing the ethnic card which can sow seeds of discord and disunity and prepare the grounds for confusion, social upheavals and violence.
We have a beautiful country, a hospitable and peace-loving people. Many things are going well for us. We are now on the plateau of giving further impetus to our development and nature has been kind to us to bestow on us resources such as oil to leap-frog our socio-economic transformation.
The international community has already given us the thumps up for an exercise well executed in a peaceful manner.
We should, therefore, protect the integrity of the electoral process and keep the beauty and unity of the nation for ourselves and posterity.
AS usual, the blame game has begun. The National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) has become the target of everybody’s condemnation since the announcement of the electoral results by the Electoral Commission (EC).
The NCCE has been blamed by many people for the many spoilt ballot papers. As many as 205,438 ballot papers, representing 2.4 per cent of the votes cast, were rejected for unexplained reasons in the December 7, 2008 general election. Similarly, as many as 220,216 ballots were rejected in the 2004 general election.
The high number of rejected ballots underlies the need for intensive voter education in the country's electoral process.
The functions of the commission, as indicated in Article 223 of the Constitution, include: To create and sustain within society the awareness, principle and objectives of the Constitution as the fundamental law of the people of Ghana; to educate and encourage the public to defend the Constitution from all forms of abuse and violation; and to formulate, implement and oversee programmes intended to inculcate in the citizens of Ghana awareness of the core responsibility and appreciation of their rights and obligations as free people.
The EC, among its functions as per Article 45, Sub-section (d), is to educate the people on the electoral process and its purpose. Thus, clearly, between these two institutions one has a bigger responsibility towards voter education and ensuring that when voters go to the polling booths they do the right thing.
Unfortunately, because, rightly or wrongly, most Ghanaians have assumed that the NCCE is charged with educating people on their civic responsibilities, the blame for the volume of rejected ballots is laid at its doorstep.
However, since 1993 very little has been done to resource the NCCE adequately to take on this big role of re-orientating the mindset of the Ghanaian. In every election year when people besiege or inundate the government with requests for resourcing the EC, they forget about the NCCE.
Throughout the country, the NCCE has been denied the resources to deliver on its mandate, although many of us acknowledge that no nation can progress if its people do not receive orientation. Every now and then Ghanaians are quick to insist on their rights but they forget their obligations to the state.
There can be ownership of and participation in the decision-making process only if the people know their rights and responsibilities in order to hold the government accountable. Indeed, Article 11 of the Constitution states categorically that "The Sovereignty of Ghana resides in the people of Ghana in whose name and for whose welfare the powers of government are to be exercised in the manner and within the limits laid down in the Constitution."
This is a heavy responsibility that the Constitution imposes on all Ghanaians and the only way issues of governance, civic responsibility and obligation can reach the doorstep of the people is through a well resourced, efficient and results-oriented NCCE.
It is not very clear whether the present resources, both material and manpower, the NCCE can achieve its goals and objectives. We are mindful of the fact that the NCCE and the EC cannot on their own discharge their obligations without the support of the people.
Having considered that fact, the core functions of those two organisations can only be performed by their staff. The NCCE can meet the high expectation of the public only when the State recognises its role and provides the resources, as well as motivate the staff, to lead the crusade to instil a sense of nationalism and patriotism in the people.
It is therefore hoped that before the next four years when the country subjects its leaders to the rendering of account of their stewardship, the NCCE will be adequately resourced to such a extent that there will be no need to examine the reasons for what went wrong.
The media of Ghana is one of the most free in Africa, and had previously undergone a series of government overthrows by military leaders and periods of severe restriction. Chapter 12 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana guarentees freedom of the press and independence of the media, while Chapter 2 prohibts censorship. Post independence, the government and media often had a tense relationship, with private outlets closed during the military coups and strict media laws that prevent criticism of government. The media freedoms were restored in 1992, and after the election in 2000 of John Kufuor the tensions between the private media and government decreased. Kufuor was a supporter of press freedom and repealed a libel law, though maintained that the media had to act responsibily. The Ghanian media has been described as "one of the most unfettered" in Africa, operating with little restriction on private media. The private press often carries criticism of government policy. The media were vigourous in their coverage of the 2008 Ghanian presidential election, and the Ghanian Journalists Association (GJA) praised John Atta Mills on his election, hoping to foster a good media-government relationship.

The Power of the Media

The struggle over who gets what, when, and how is largely carried out in the mass media. Media power is concentrated in the leading television news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN), national newspapers (Washington Post, New York Times, Wall St. Journal), and newsmagazines (Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report). Television is the first true mass communication medium because it is in virtually every home. The average home TV is turned on seven hours a day and shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20 are among the most popular. Today the Internet is assuming the proportions of mass media, partly under the auspices of existing media as in the case of www.cnn.com or www.newsweek.com.

Reporters and news editors usually deny that they are powerful political actors, claiming they only mirror society; but the "myth of the mirror" is that the media do play key roles in setting the American political agenda by determining what news is to be covered, how much, and in what context.

Agenda Setting. This is the real power of the media. The media do not just passively report the news. They select what is to be covered, thereby setting a political agenda. Conversely, media inattention can allow governments to continue ineffective policies or worse. The media can even propel a latent issue into a "crisis" with which government must deal.
The media have effects in setting the political agenda and in helping form new opinions, but they are less effective in changing existing opinions or in changing political behavior.

"Information overload" also diminishes the effects of the media, as does the relative disinterest of many Americans in political news. Moreover, the public exercises selective perception, mentally screening out information and opinions with which they disagree. And, the focus of network executives on government scandals has been found to produce feelings of general political distrust and cynicism toward government and the political system now called television malaise. The result of the media performing their self-declared watchdog role can be alienation rather than reform.

Still, television news anchors have high credibility and trust with the public and their opinions have the greatest media effect on mass opinion. Others who have been shown to have an effect on mass opinion through media exposure include independent experts and popular presidents, whereas interest groups often have little or even a counter-productive effect.

In the areas of media sex and violence, a common focus of study and debate, evidence suggests the media are more likely to reinforce than to change existing behavior patterns. Thus televised violence seems to trigger violent behavior in children predisposed to violence, but not in average children.

In the area of political advertising, ads are more successful in motivating supporters to actually go to the polls and vote. Ads are much less effective in winning converts. Name recognition and maintaining campaign momentum and enthusiasm are often the objectives of political advertising, not conversion.

1. Diverging political agenda-setting studies Questions concerning the mass media’s impact on society are as old as the media themselves. Opposing views and conflicting research results have led to different conclusions ranging from minimal-effects to powerful mass media. During the last three decades the notion of agenda-setting has probably provided the most influential and fertile paradigm in media and communications research. When mass media emphasize a topic, the audience/public receiving the message will consider this topic to be important (Cohen 1963; McCombs and Shaw 1972). More recent and less developed is the study on the relation between the media and the political agenda. No longer the public’s priorities but rather the political priorities are considered as being the result of media impact. Do the mass media determine the political agenda? Put more precisely: under what specific circumstances are mass media, via their coverage of an issue, able to boost political attention for that issue? That is the basic query of this paper. If one is interested in the media’s impact on politics this is probably one of the most basic questions that can be raised. It comes as no surprise, then, that we are not the first to be interested in this mystery. During the last decade media and politics students have, with increasing incidence, embarked upon solving the media and political agenda-setting puzzle. The results of these studies were contradictory with some studies heralding the 1 The authors would like to thank Holli Semetko, Jan Kleinnijenhuis and the participants of the workshop ‘Political agenda-setting and the media’ of the ECPR joint sessions in Uppsala, Sweden (April 2004) for sharing their ideas with us.

media’s political agenda-setting power and others denying any power to the media at all. Most bewildering, though, was that these mixed outcomes did not spark a scholarly debate about the incongruous findings’ reasons. Authors tended to simply juxtapose their results without scrutinizing why their conclusions were different from, or congruent with, previous studies. No real cumulative effort has been undertaken so far. In a nutshell: the field of media and political agenda-setting is disparate and undertheorized. In this contribution we want to fill this void by confronting the available studies analytically. As media and political agenda-setting studies are slowly burgeoning and the subfield is growing to maturity, such an integrative effort comes timely. Only by confronting, comparing and systematizing the available evidence generated by previous studies can we make inroads in understanding the media’s political agenda-setting power. Setting up an empirical media and political agenda-setting study always implies making six basic design choices. Precisely the diverging design choices of the studies at hand accounts for their contradictory results. Carefully charting these design differences is elementary to explain why some studies established the existence of strong media effects while others denied the media to have any impact at all and, thus, is a prerequisite for making progress with political agenda-setting. TABLE 1 contains an overview of the available (non-electoral) political agendasetting studies and shows out which choices previous studies made. (1) The first choice relates to the polity to be examined, be it national or subnational. An overwhelming majority of the available studies was carried out in the US and focussed on the US presidential or congressional agenda. Apart from the US there are only a handful Dutch and Canadian political agenda-setting studies. (2) Second, there is the media agenda: which media are investigated and associated with the political agenda? Most studies relied on TV and/or newspaper data. By and large, measuring the media agenda has been a fairly standardized process with most researches adopting similar sampling and coding procedures.

(3) As political agenda-setting studies never take all issues into account, the third choice regards the specific issues to examine. Media matter for some issues, but much less for others. Issue selection is, probably, the dimension in which political agenda-setting studies, and agenda-setting in general, have made most progress. Obtrusive and unobtrusive issues, for example, foster different agenda-setting dynamics. (4) Fourth, there is the methods choice and how to account for time. Political agenda-setting implies a time gap between issue coverage and issue adoption by political actors. Some studies relied on time-series designs, to be preferred because better capable of tapping causality, yet other researches were cross-sectional or were based on interviews. The available time-series studies differentiated strongly in terms of time units and time gaps.

That leaves us with two design choices we believe to be the most crucial and the least looked into: which political agendas to take into account and what time period to examine? Intertwined they can explain most of the diverging outcomes. (5) The definition and measurement of the political agenda is far from standard, but differs in almost all studies at hand. There appears to be no such thing as the political agenda but rather an archipelago of different loosely associated political agendas. All these agendas are run by specific political actors, they have their own logic and obey particular rules. This affects their susceptibility for media coverage. Political agenda choice, hence, deserves to be at the heart of the political agenda-setting debate. (6) In terms of time period, previous studies took diverging periods into consideration. Some studies were campaign studies focussing on media and political agendas during the months, mostly weeks, before the polls. Others examined routine political times sometimes stretching out over a prolonged time period. We believe that both election and non-election periods times are fundamentally different and that behaviour of political actors, and their reaction on media coverage, follows different logics in both periods. That is why both types of studies, electoral and routine times, yielded diverging outcomes. In short: political agendas and time periods, we argue, are the most crucial design choices to be made and can account for a large part of previous studies’ contradicting results. Moreover, these dimensions have been almost completely neglected in the research literature. Hardly any available study really problematizes the option for this or that political agenda, or for a certain time period. Putting political agendas and time periods center stage brings order in the apparent chaos of media and political agenda-setting research and generates better hypotheses whom and when the media might influence. That is why we this contribution will focus exclusively on these two distinctions.

In the next section of this article we show that the available (non-election) studies resulted in conflicting outcomes. Then, we pinpoint the diverging conceptualization and measurement of the political agenda and demonstrate that political agenda choice makes a difference. Next, we turn to our time period argument making the point that elections or non-elections times matter. Finally, we sketch the consequences for political agenda-setting studies, systematize our findings and present a preliminary behavioural theory of political agenda-setting which, hopefully, can generate useful hypotheses for further research. 2. Contradicting results Starting with McCombs & Shaw’s Chapel Hill study (1972) media and communications researchers have been investigating the media’s impact on the public’s priorities for a long time. Numerous studies all over the world established firm correlations between the media’s and the public’s priorities (McCombs and Shaw 1993; Dearing and Rogers 1996; Ghanem 1996). Within political science too, agenda-setting is a frequently used model (some would say it is no more than a metaphor). Political scientists draw on agenda-setting to describe and explain how political institutions on different levels and with different functions (government, parliament, civil servants, political parties...) determine their priorities, give attention to or ignore issues, and do, or do not, take decisions or take a stance concerning these topics (Cobb and Elder 1971; Kingdon 1984; Laver and Budge 1992; Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Klingemann, Hofferbert et al. 1994). Political scientists’ agenda-setting research focuses mainly on endogenous political factors and they ascribe the presence of issues on the agenda of a certain political actor (e.g. government or congress), to the influence of another political actor (e.g. political party or the president) or to issues on the same agenda in a preceding period (incrementalism). The bulk of agenda-setting studies was conducted by media and public opinion sholars and focussed on media and public opinion and not on media and politics. The number of studies explicitly focussing on the political agenda and the media remains limited (Rogers, Dearing et al. 1993; Eilders 1997; Schultz 1997). In fact, both agenda-setting traditions, in communication and in political science, developed separately. Only timidly starting in the mid-80s some scholars began to concentrate on the media and the political agenda. They scrutinised if and how (public and) media agendas, previously the focus only of communications researchers, interact with political agendas, formerly the exclusive playground of political scientists. The outcome of these investigations was mixed and both scholars, in communications and in political science, seemed to stick to their core business: “If media scholars are, by and large, much taken with the agenda-setting power of the press, many scholars of traditional political institutions seem less impressed”(Bartels 1996).

TABLE 1 contains an analytical overview of the available studies and their main conclusions. Its last column shows that some studies revealed only modest or even absent media impact. The impact of the media on the political agenda, these scholars state, is limited. Walker, for example, pointed out that The New York Times, concerning the three innovative safety laws passed in the US Senate from the 1950s onwards, simply followed the legislative process in stead of leading it (Walker 1977). Kingdon (1984: 61-62), based on interviews with political decision-making insiders in the US, stated that: “One can find examples of media importance... but such examples are fairly rare... The media report what is going on in government, by and large, rather than having an independent effect on government agendas.” Light followed a similar research track, interviewing the US president’s advisors about whom were the most important agencies fuelling the domestic agenda. He concluded that the media were not important because they were only seldom mentioned by policy makers (Light 1982; Considine 1998). Kleinnijenhuis & Rietberg (1995) in their study of economic issues in The Netherlands even found a net negative impact of media on the political agenda. In a later study, Kleinnijenhuis (2003) found only very limited media impact on politics and a much stronger reverse impact. The limited power of the media, some of these authors speculate, is due to their short attention span always running from one crisis to another hence diluting their impact on the slower workings of democracy (Kingdon 1984; Protess and McCombs 1991; Dearing and Rogers 1996). Another weakness of the media, says Kingdon (1984), is its propensity to highlight the most spectacular stories, while these stories tend to take place at the end of the policy-making process, and not at the beginning. Except for specific issues like foreign policy (Herman 1993; Livingston 1997; Mermin 1997), for special kinds of journalism like investigation journalism (Molotch, Protess et al. 1987; Protess, Cook et al. 1987; Protess, Cook et al. 1991), and for some uncommon and non-routine crisis situations (Walker 1977; Eichhorn 1996; Wood and Peake 1998) the media’s political agenda-setting impact is limited, these scholars affirm.

Other researchers, in contrast, claimed the existence of strong media bearings on the political agenda. In their influential overview of agenda-setting research, Dearing & Rogers (1996: 74) state that “The mass media often have a direct influence on the policy agenda-setting process”. Among the founding fathers of the political science tradition of studying agendas, Cobb & Elder (1971: 909) stated more than 30 years ago: “The media can also play a very important role in elevating issues to the systemic agenda and increasing their chances of receiving consideration on institutional agendas.” Edwards & Wood (1999) established an independent media impact on the foreign and the domestic agenda of the US president. Trumbo (1995) closely examined the rise and fall of the global warming issue from 1985 till 1992 and concluded that the media played a considerable role in the heightening of policy attention for the issue. Linsky (1986), after empirical research among US policy makers, attributes a lot of agenda-setting power to the media. Soroka (Soroka 2002) came to similar conclusions based on a time series analysis of three issues in Canada linking the media with a whole range of political agendas: especially in terms of the environmental issue, an unobtrusive issue, the media were setting the agenda of public and politics. Baumgartner and colleagues found a firm relationship between media attention and US congressional attention for four domestic issues and concluded “... that the media help create situations that make increased government attention almost unavoidable” (Baumgartner, Jones et al. 1997). Bartels, as well relying on longitudinal time-series data, maintained that the media have an independent impact on the political agenda. Concerning The New York Times , the undisputed major institution of the American press, Bartels states that “... the results presented here support the claim that, by and large, The Times led and the politicians followed.”(Bartels 1996) Drawing upon an innovative experimental design also Cook and colleagues (1983) found that policymakers were influenced by watching TV news and considered the covered topic to be more important, and thought that government action was more urgent, after than before watching the programme. Of the 20 studies included in TABLE 1, almost half established a strong media impact on the political agenda, 3 resulted in considerable impact conclusions, 4 found only weak impact, 3 recorded hardly any impact and 1 study concluded that the media did not have any impact at all. Most recent studies all relied on timeseries analyses and recorded, except for the studies of Kleinnijenhuis (2003) and Landry et al. (1997), a larger media impact than before. 3. About institutional and symbolic political agendas Agenda-setting scholars agree on how to measure the public and the media agenda. Yet, as Dearing & Rogers (1996: 18) state in their 1996 overview of agenda-setting research: “... measures of the policy agenda vary from study to study much more than do measures of the media agenda and the public agenda which are fairly standard.” Defining and measuring the political agenda is the trickiest choices to be made by political agenda-setting students. Polities consist of different governmental branches each with their proper logic, dynamics, competences, procedures and interests. Knowing, for example, that a state’s budget only changes incrementally and that a budget is as a slowly reacting oil tanker - votes have to be found, agreements have to be struck, procedures have to be developed, agencies have to be set up - it is hardly surprising that studies have found no link between media coverage and subsequent budgetary spending (Landry, Varone et al. 1997)(for an opposite account see: (Pritchard and Berkowitz 1993)). Thus, the choice for a certain political agenda as being the one and only political agenda largely moulds the outcome. Strangely enough, the few available studies did not really problematize their choice for a certain political agenda, nor did they speculate about how their choice might have affected their outcomes or about what difference another agenda choice would have made.

A wide range of diverging political agendas and indicators has been employed: from assessing the political party agendas by considering all issue references ascribed to that party in the media (Kleinnijenhuis 2003), over a count of the days spend on hearings about issues in US Congress, to an assessment of the paragraphs devoted to an issue in the yearly presidential activity reports (Edwards and Wood 1999). Column 4 in TABLE 1 contains an overview of the agendas which these studies used. Political agenda choice comes with three sub decisions: the selection of an agenda of a certain political actor (e.g. congress/parliament, president, government, budget, political parties, supreme court, prosecutors, interest groups...), the choice for a certain indicator tapping issue saliency on this agenda, and the decision about the number of political agendas to consider at the same time. To start with the latter, most studies are confined to one or two political agendas. To our knowledge, only the work of Protess’ research group (Cook, Tyler et al. 1983; Protess, Cook et al. 1987; Protess, Cook et al. 1991) and Soroka (2002) considered more than two political agendas simultaneously. Limiting ‘the’ political agenda to the agenda of only one or two political actors artificially reduces the scope of politics and, more importantly, makes it impossible to control for effects between political agendas. If political agendas are affecting each other, and we have every reason to expect them to do so, picking out one political agenda and associating it with media coverage discards intra political agenda-setting effects. Caused by another political agenda, established relations could be spurious and mistakenly attributed to the media’s impact. Regarding agenda choice, the distinction between symbolic and substantial political agendas is crucial. Some studies focussed on symbolic rather than on substantial political agendas, merely reflecting ‘policy’ changes that are largely rhetorical rather than substantial with tangible regulatory, legislative or administrative consequences (Cobb, Ross et al. 1976; Protess, Cook et al. 1987; Baumgartner, Jones et al. 1997; Soroka 2002). Protess and colleagues discern three potential political results of media reporting: deliberative (debates, hearings), individual (sanctioning, promoting) and substantial (policy changes)(Protess, Cook et al. 1991). Deliberation can be considered as symbolic while individual and policy measures are situated on the substantial side of the continuum. Most of the scholars who actually found strong media bearings on political agendas defined their political agenda in a symbolic manner (Bartels 1996; Wood and Peake 1998; Edwards and Wood 1999). The US presidential agenda, for example, was defined as containing all issues about which the president spoke in public (speeches, press briefings) or communicated about to the public (press releases, press officers’ briefings) venting the president’s opinion on the issue of the day. Not surprisingly those scholars found firm correlations between the presidential agenda and media content. Those presidential outlets are explicitly targeting the media and try to respond to media cues in order to get the line of the day out. In fact, these studies only substantiated a relationship between the media agenda and the media-targeted political communication of a core political player. But a US president’s communication is for the most part mere symbolic, showing that he cares about an issue and that he is busy handling it. Many of his public utterances have no policy consequences whatsoever. Edwards & Wood note that while US president Ronald Reagan, for example, was publicly communicating a lot on educational issues he did hardly implement any educational policy (Edwards and Wood 1999). We could even define a symbolic agenda as consisting of those issue mentions by politicians for which getting into the media is the only aim: (reaching) the media is the message. A similar point was made by Pritchard and Berkowitz in their longitudinal account of crime coverage and its political responses. They assert that the media are able to influence the symbolic agenda – “... those lists of issues that require visible but not necessarily substantive action on the part of the policymakers” – but that media systematically fail to impact what they call the resource agenda, that is “... those lists of issues that require substantive action, including the possible allocation of resources”(Pritchard and Berkowitz 1993). They conclude as follows: “Symbolic agendas are inherently more flexible than resource agendas. It is fairly simple for policy makers to hold a news conference, issue a press release, or make proposals for reform. It can be quite difficult for them to shift resources from one priority to another.... Resource agendas seem to be more resistant to media influence than are symbolic agendas.”(Pritchard and Berkowitz 1993)
A single glance at TABLE 1 suffices to note that the kind of political agenda matters a lot. All strong impact conclusions were based on enquiries that examined symbolic political agendas, that is: a political actor’s public communication about an issue without having necessarily a tangible policy consequence. Whenever substantial political agendas like legislation and resource allocation were considered, researchers where much less impressed by the media’s impact. Also studies based on interviews with policy makers, tended to minimize the media’s power because the interviewees probably focussed on substantial agendas when answering media impact questions and/or because they implicitly compared media’s power with the influence of other political actors. Most time-series researches, as we already said, were not geared up to compare the media’s impact with the influences of other political actors since they do not take several political agendas into account.

Recapitulating, the political agenda does not exist. Political agendas can be placed on a continuum ranging from substantial or ‘high’ to symbolic or ‘low’ agendas. As the results of previous studies point out, defining the political agenda too narrow only considering the highest political agendas makes media impact sheer untraceable in empirical research; defining the political agenda too symbolic, on the other hand, confining it to the lowest political agendas, makes finding media-effects trivial and irrelevant because they are void of any political consequences. Politics is made by different political actors ranging from institutional (parliament, government) to non-institutional actors (political parties, interest groups). All these actors have their own agenda, some of them even master several agendas which are more or less independent from one another. Sometimes, the same actor or institution even runs a symbolic and a substantial agenda at the same time. Parliament in most polities, for example, has to control the executive branch and monitor its initiatives but, at the same time, it holds legislative power. Grilling government and passing legislation are different things and entails different behaviour from MPs. It is likely that media coverage affects both parliamentary tasks differently with some activities susceptible for media coverage and others almost immune for media incentives. 4. About election and routine political times The basic tenet of the previous section was that political agendas vary, and a student’s choice for a certain agenda moulds the outcome of his enquiry. Symbolic political agendas are more, and more immediately, affected by the media than substantial political agendas. But not only political agenda selection matters. As important is the time frame in which agenda-setting takes place. Political agendasetting is inherently contingent on time. Every so often media matter more for political actors than in other times. The apex of democracy and a matter of political life and death, elections have an immense impact on the power and status of political actors. Elections campaigns are seen as ever more crucial for electoral uccess. More and more ‘floating’ voters make up their mind in this short period just before the ballot (Panebianco 1988; McAllister 2002). In Britain in the early sixties only one out of ten decided during the campaign, at the end of the nineties this was already one out of four (Norris et. al., 1999). As a consequence the potential impact of election campaigns has surged and for parties and candidates it is more than ever crucial to set the agenda in this period. In the struggle to determine the public agenda in campaign times, the media play a crucial role. A great deal of agenda-setting studies, starting with the classic Chapel Hill study, focus on campaign periods to analyse the influence of the media on the public agenda (Shaw and McCombs 1977; Weaver, Graber et al. 1981; Semetko and Schoenbach 1994). In recent years also the relationship between the media and the political agenda entered the focus of campaign students (Semetko, Blumler et al. 1991; Roberts and McCombs 1994; Norris, Curtice et al. 1999; Brandenburg 2002; Brandenburg 2004). These studies examine to what extent media and political parties are interacting during the campaign: did the political parties manage to set the media and the public agenda or did parties rather follow media leads?

Although these campaign studies, compared to routine-times studies, draw upon the same political agenda-setting model, situate themselves within the same research tradition, refer to the same founding fathers of agenda-setting and largely rely on the same research design matching media content with measures of political attention, there appears to be hardly any dialogue between both strands of political agenda-setting research. Only a handful of studies mention, aside, that campaign and routine times might foster different agenda-setting dynamics but these studies remain vague about how this different dynamic might be conceptualized (Palmgreen and Clarke 1977; Dalton, Beck et al. 1998; Walgrave and Deswert 2004). Campaign scholars and routine-period analysts seem to live in separate worlds. Their scholarly segregation is partly explained by the fact that campaign studies tend to focus on political party agendas only and they do not include parliament, government, president or other political actors whose agendas fascinate routine-time students. Campaign studies not only focus on political parties but more specifically on parties’ campaign communication: press briefings, party manifestoes and stump speeches. Yet, in terms of the simple typology we developed in the previous section distinguishing symbolic and substantial agendas, there is nothing special about parties’ campaign messages that makes them unique and incomparable with other symbolic political agendas. In fact, the aim of all symbolic politics is to get the message in the media, and to connect with the public. One could even state that all symbolic politics is campaign politics. This does not mean that the political agenda during campaigns is without policy implications. Elections influence the governmental agenda which in turn affects the next election campaign (Budge 1993). In short: routine times and election times are treated as if they belonged to different worlds. But they do not.

Contrary to the mixed results of routine time studies, the outcomes of campaign studies are less contradictory: in contrast to the former studies agree that media’s impact on politics (political parties) is limited or even absent. Norris et al. (1999), for instance, concluded that in the 1997 British election campaign the media failed to set the party agenda, and vice versa. The issues most reported in the media were not the ones that were most prominent on the priority list of the major parties. This led the researchers to conclude that “Journalists and politicians were marching to different beats in the election”. At first sight, these results seem to contradict the studies on the US presidential campaign of 1992. Dalton and colleagues (Dalton, Beck et al. 1998) showed that media and major candidates were on the same track and their issue agendas resembled each other very well. However, the authors found little evidence that the media were responsible for this agenda convergence. According to Just et al. (1996), studying the same election campaign, the role of the public agenda was crucial. Opinion polls showed that there was a remarkably strong consensus among the public that the economy (and jobs) was by far the most important issue. This general concern was picked up by both parties and media (Just, Crigler et al. 1996). Both studies concluded that both politicians and media are part of a larger transaction process that sets the agenda of elections.

These limited effects results can possibly be due to the fact that the relation between media and politics was not the main focus of these campaign studies. Like in classic public agenda-setting studies most campaign studies concentrated on the influence of politics and media on the public. Perhaps, a more systematic analysis of media and party agenda could have generated stronger political agenda-setting effects. Recently some efforts have been made to analyze both agendas in full detail. Brandenburg, for example, compared party and media agenda on a day tot day basis. Using the same 1997 British election campaign data as Norris and colleagues (1999) he showed that political parties did influence media agendas trough their daily communications but hardly responded to stimuli from the media (Brandenburg 2002). A similar study about the 2002 Irish election campaign confirmed that parties, in this case the major political party (Fianna Fail), are the main agenda builders and that the media largely followed. Some media outlets like the Irish Times also influenced the party communications, but these effects were infrequent and small. To summarize: parties clearly influence the media agenda, but the media have hardly any effect on the party agenda (Brandenburg 2004). The findings of Brandenburg seem to be confirmed by other studies in other countries. Kleinnijenhuis and colleagues came to similar conclusions for the 2003 Dutch elections. It was Pim Fortuyn and his populist party that set the media agenda and not the other way around. Fortuyn’s fierce criticism on the parties in government, his analysis of the Netherlands as a country in severe crisis, and the focus on issues like immigrants and crime became prominent items in the news. The media followed Fortuyn and helped him to dominate the public debate (Kleinnijenhuis 2003). Also Roberts en McCombs (1994) demonstrated the agenda-setting power of the candidates’ political agenda on the media agenda in the 1990 Texas gubernational campaign. Their time series analysis showed that the television ads of the major candidates had a strong impact on the topics in the television news. The opposite influence of the TV news on the candidates’ agenda was absent. Newspapers only had a limited impact. How can the minimal political agenda-setting power of the media in campaign periods be explained? Why do the media seem to set effectively the agenda in normal times, at least according to some studies, while they tend to follow the political agenda in election times? Knowing that during campaigns the political agenda is merely a symbolic agenda, and that we showed earlier that the media’s impact is much larger when it comes to symbolic agendas, these limited effect results are even more startling. The short period that is being studied in campaign studies can be part of the explanation. Media-effects often work slow drip by drip over a prolonged period of time and take time to percolate through. (Norris, Curtice et al. 1999; Walgrave and Deswert 2004). Agenda-setting studies in nonelection times covering a longer period are better placed to grasp these slower cumulative effects than campaign studies spanning per definition a short time frame. Most political agenda’s are per definition slower than the fast evolving media-agendas. However, this can not explain why even daily political agenda’s like press conferences or press releases seemed little influenced by the media agenda. We claim that the electoral context radically changes the behavior of both players, media and politicians and, hence, that political agenda-setting dynamics are different in campaign times compared to routine times.

First: the composition of the, normally, multilayered and complex political agenda changes dramatically and central actors like government and parliament make place for political parties who become extremely active proselytizers in campaign times. Dalton and colleagues (1998) state that the agenda-setting role of the media is smaller exactly because parties and candidates are much more vigorously trying to influence the public agenda. Their whole behaviour and all their actions are aimed to set the agenda and to dominate the public debate. In fact, substantial political agendas are simply nonexistent in election times: government and parliament are not meeting, and if they do all their deeds are (interpreted as being) inspired by the upcoming elections. The rich and layered assortment of mutually connected political agendas so typical for routine times is narrowed down to merely the party agenda. The PM, for example, is no longer the PM but a party politician running for office. Government coalitions speaking with one voice before fall apart in quarrelling and dissenting parties. The electoral context makes it difficult for the media to set the public agenda independently and to focus on issues that are not brought forward by parties or candidates. In non-election periods parties and government are less active communicating their messages and, even if they are, the media are less obliged to present these messages extensively. Referring to the public’s interest, the media can more freely focus on not politically initiated issues. But during a campaign parties have daily press conferences, create their own (campaign) events, and indefatigably flood the media with press releases. To draw media attention candidates and parties continuously make strong statements. The public too is directly targeted with ads, flyers and canvassing. In some countries with a strong public television tradition parties even receive free air time to communicate directly with their voters (Semetko 1996). Thus: in election times political actors are much more aggressive agenda-setters and this limits the agendasetting capacities of the media. Second: the media devote more attention to politics in campaign times which opens opportunity windows for political actors. Election campaign periods also differ from routine periods because of the different structure of the news (Semetko, Blumler et al. 1991). During campaigns the share of political news surges on TV as well as in newspapers. In Belgium, for example, both public and private television news feature special ‘campaign news’ items of almost ten minutes a day in the three weeks before election day. The same applies to newspapers who include longer articles and extra pages devoted to the election campaign (Hart 2000). Although a lot of the surplus media attention can be labelled as ‘horse race’ coverage (Patterson 1993), this does not mean that all issue coverage is brushed aside by who is leading and who is losing the race (Just, Crigler et al. 1996). There is plenty of room for parties and candidates to get their substantial message across. In short: the process of gate keeping is less stringent for (national) politicians in the weeks before an election compared to non-election periods. The media gates are wide open for any politician with a message.

To summarize, we believe there are several reasons for the media to have less impact on the political agenda in election than in non-election times. Parties and candidates are more active in spreading their message and the media are desperately searching for political news to fill extra pages and minutes devoted to the elections. As they are closely monitored some media, especially public television, try harder to be impartial and neutral during campaigns. That the media’s political agenda-setting role is limited in election campaigns does not imply that the media cannot play an important role in the campaign nor that they cannot codetermine the outcome. The media, for instance, most probably fuel the personalization of politics and contribute to a ‘candidate centered politics’ (Farrell 1996; Swanson and Mancini 1996; Mughan 2000) or even to ‘personality politics’ (Hart 1992). Politicians consider the media as crucial for electoral success and adjust their style and discourse to the laws of modern media. However, this does not seem to imply that politicians’ substantial agendas are determined by the media and let the media decide which issues to stress during the campaign.

Towards a theory of the media and political agenda setting
In the introduction we stated that studying the media’s impact on the political agenda implies six basic research choices. Depending on the political system, the nature of the media agenda, the specific issues, the methodology, the nature of the political agenda, and the period under study, the results of similar studies can vary extensively. The last two elements got more attention in this article because we think they are most crucial but, at the same time, hardly investigated. While there is no such thing as ‘the’ political agenda specific agendas react differently to mediainput. We showed that the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic seems to be crucial to explain weak or strong media-effects. The more symbolic a political agenda is the more influential the media are. The more non-symbolic or substantial the agenda is, the weaker the media effect. Of course, this does not mean that the media, in some cases, cannot have considerable impact on a substantial policy agenda. Nor does it imply that all symbolic political agenda’s are constantly pervaded with media issues. Especially in campaign periods the impact of the media on the (symbolic) political agenda seems limited. We argued that this is not only due to the short time frame of most campaign studies but also to the specific dynamic of elections (temporarily) changing politicians’ and media’s behaviour.

Political actors might react on media coverage for several reasons. First, to some extent they are affected by the media just like ordinary citizens and they react to media coverage just like the public at large does. Politicians consume news and they (unconsciously) consider the covered issues to be important. This is all the more the case since politicians are true news addicts veraciously consuming large chunks of daily news and are exposed to loads of media content (Pritchard 1992; Eilders 1997). To some degree, hence, public and political agenda-setting are overlapping. Yet exactly this overlap contributed to the theoretical deficiency of the political agenda-setting field as most political agenda-setting research implicitly drew upon

heory and hypotheses used in public agenda-setting research. It is obvious, however, that there are crucial differences between public and political agendasetting. Political agenda-setting is a macro and not a micro process. It involves many competing and dependent actors and political agendas are hypercompetitive environments with actors deliberately besieging the political agenda, while the public agenda is relatively ‘empty’, were it not for the media. The most crucial difference, though, is that public agenda-setting is a cognitive process while political agenda-setting is essentially a behavioral process: it is not what politicians think or believe but what they do that matters (Pritchard 1992). While it is easy for a member of the public to shift attention, it does not cost anything since attention is just ‘caring about’, shifting attention is a completely different thing for political actors. It implies the laborious and conflictual reallocation of time, personnel, money and resources. Precisely for that reason we need a specific behavioral theory of political actors and we cannot simply rely on the simple public agenda-setting model. Second, politicians also react on media cues to communicate with each other. In advanced industrial democracies media are part of politics, they are the marketplace/arena in which political ideas and proposals are launched, tested, scrutinized and combated. Media are frequently used by politicians to put out a feeler or to react to it. Cabinet ministers, heads of state, parliamentarians, civil servants, and political parties all communicate, internally as well as with each other, via the media and, consequently, they react on media’s issue coverage with messages primarily meant for their colleague politicians and not for the public (Heffernan 2004).

issue priorities and that they gain their understanding of public opinion through the media (Cook, Tyler et al. 1983). Paradoxically, the less direct evidence on public opinion available via opinion polling, the more politicians will take media’s influence on public opinion for granted and the more they will consider the media as a good indicator, a proxy, of what the public cares for (Kennamer 1992; Pritchard 1992; Pritchard and Berkowitz 1993). This would mean that especially in poll-free societies political actors tend to consider the media as mirroring public opinion, they simply have no other way of finding out the public’s preferences. Consequently media might be more influential in these polities than in polities permeated with constant polling and public opinion navel-gazing. Linsky (Linsky 1986) showed that even in the US, a country with a long and vibrant polling tradition, political authorities have the propensity to identify media coverage with public opinion and to take their cues on the public’s priorities from the media and not from polling, although widely available. In a similar vein, Pritchard speculates that the poll boom in the US in the 90s might have diminished the political role of the press (Pritchard 1992). Once one accepts that media and public opinion are associated, it is natural for politicians to follow the media. Priming, for example, makes political actors to be evaluated by the public based on the issues put forward by the media and, consequently, politicians do their best to impress the people regarding media issues and to display their commitment (Iyengar and Reeves 1997). Not reacting on mediatized topics might be considered as incapacity or, worse, indifference. As a result, politicians tend to adopt media issues, if not by solving the issue with real policy measures than, at least, by showing that they are aware of it, that they care, and that they are busy dealing with it. Their reaction, hence, is often more symbolical than substantial. In a sense, it is more important for political actors to communicate about an issue than what to communicate about it. The basic message is: we are on top of this and decisively handling it.

By and large, we expect government to react less and slower but more substantially on media coverage, while we anticipate the legislator (or at least the executive controlling part of it) to react more often, more immediately yet largely symbolically on media coverage. Slower institutional procedures associated with real policy measures, checked and balanced internal decision-making practises, its more outspoken specialization, and its strength as inexorable political source make government to react slower and (thus) more substantial. As a rule government’s political agenda is less flexible, more cemented by previous arrangements and meticulously balanced agreements. Especially when it comes to coalition governments built on a lengthy government agreement, governments’ substantial policy actions are immunized against media impact. Pressures to react and to show leadership especially regarding to crisis situations or negative news might, in contrast, lead government to react swiftly and symbolically. Its better media access guarantees that even minister’s verbal reactions void of any serious consequence can pass the media gates and become news. More or less the opposite applies to parliament. Parliament, however, is an ambivalent institution with majority and minority initiatives mixed. The legislative part of parliaments’ activities, especially the actual passing of new bills, goes probably through even lengthier checked and balanced procedures than governments actions do. But the daily surveillance and monitoring of government is more flexible and, hence, prone to media impact. Procedures are relatively short, and (opposition) MPs are free to raise whichever topic they want. In terms of strong presidential systems, we expect an even more media responsive presidential agenda than for parliaments. Presidential initiatives are normally less constrained by institutional rules - he/she can communicate about anything anytime - nor are presidents bound by their party, by a government agreement or by internal decision making procedures. Moreover, presidents are expected to react on tidings of misfortune, to show leadership and to reassure the nation that they are in charge. Their media access is almost unlimited since they personify the state’s power. In many presidential regimes the president is a generalist policy maker whose competences encompass all policy domains. So we expect presidents to be especially susceptible for media coverage and the presidential agenda to be continuously affected by news’ issue attention. The more presidential systems entrust the president with a lot of powers and the less it contains veto players, the easier and faster a president can induce policy changes. The more powerful the president, hence, the more his instant reactions on media coverage might result in real policy outcomes.