The Media as Political Agenda-Setters: Journalists’ Perceptions of Media Power in Eight West European Countries

Abstract

Studies in different countries have shown that the media can influence the attention politicians devote to different issues. However, knowledge about the cross-national contingencies of the political agenda-setting power of the media is limited. This study compares the perceptions of journalists of the political agenda-setting power of the mass media in eight parliamentary democracies with varying media and political systems: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on a power balance perspective, the article looks at the autonomy of the media system (audience reach and political control) and the concentration of power in the political system (number of political parties, concentration of executive power) to contextualise the role of the media in political agenda-setting. Journalists perceive most media influence in Norway and Sweden and least in Spain. The results indicate that the power balance between the media and political actors to a large extent reflects the institutional structure of the political system, but that media characteristics such as the autonomous position of television should also be taken into account.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for helping improve the article. The data were collected by the following research teams. For Belgium: Michiel Nuytemans, Stefaan Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst (University of Antwerp); Norway: Toril Aalberg and Ann Iren Jamtøy (Norwegian University of Science and Technology); Sweden: Jesper Strömbäck and Adam Shehata (Mid Sweden University); Netherlands: Kees Brants, Philip van Praag and Claes de Vreese (ASCOR, University of Amsterdam); other countries: Arjen van Dalen, Erik Albaek (Centre for Journalism, University of Southern Denmark), Claes de Vreese (ASCOR, University of Amsterdam). We wish to thank these scholars for generously making their data available to us.

Notes

1. The Freedom House measure of the influence of the political environment on the media ranges from 0 (low) to 40 (high) and is based on points assigned on the basis of seven questions, such as ‘To what extent are media outlets’ news and information content determined by the government or a particular partisan interest?’ (0–10 points) (Freedom House 2009).

2. The Swedish and Norwegian Social Democrats had such a position for decades, but have lost it in recent years.

3. The Spanish governing party PSOE was supported by two micro parties.

4. Response rate per country: Belgium 66 per cent, Netherlands, 61 per cent, Norway 57 per cent, Sweden 52 per cent, Denmark 74 per cent, Germany 32 per cent, United Kingdom 31 per cent, Spain 57 per cent.

5. Only Spain showed an overrepresentation of print journalists.

6. For all countries, journalists who claimed (almost) never to be in contact with politicians were excluded. In Sweden, Norway and Belgium, where we had to rely on a less narrowly defined target population, we only included journalists who mentioned a domestic party or politician in at least three of their ten most recent articles/news items.

7. The wording of the question is as follows: Below, you find a number of statements about the influence of the media on politics. To which extent do you agree or disagree? ‘The media decide which issues are important; politics has little impact on this matter.’ Scale from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree).

8. This can be seen from the relatively low standard deviations of the perceived agenda-setting power of the media, which ranged from 0.54 to 0.82, with a mean standard deviation of 0.73. This is comparable to other cross-national expert surveys (Laver and Hunt 1992; Ray 1999: 289).

9. For each country journalists working for either print media or audiovisual media gave the same answers when they compared whether television or newspapers are more influential on the political. The only exception was Germany, where journalist working for audiovisual media believed that written media were more influential while print journalists believed that both types of outlets were as equally influential.

10. For reasons of parsimony the two questions measuring the agenda-setting power of audiovisual media and of print media are combined into one media measure, since the two are strongly correlated at the individual level (r 0.64, p < 0.01).

11. The perceived importance of Spanish and German political parties is in keeping with the claims of the political science literature. Parties play an important role in Spanish politics, due to tight discipline and concentrated decision power of the party leader (Colomer 2008: 182). Germany has been described as ‘a party state’ due to the strong influence of parties on political decisions (Schmidt 2008: 71).

12. These cross-national differences reflect the institutional power of the prime minister (King 1994: 153). According to King, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom are countries where prime ministers have a high degree of power; they have medium power in Belgium, Denmark and Sweden and low power in The Netherlands and Norway.

13. The media agenda-setting scale (Cronbach’s α 0.78) is based on two questions measuring the influence of audiovisual media and print on the political agenda. The political agenda-setting scale (Cronbach’s α 0.74) is based on four questions, measuring the influence of the prime minister, ministers, members of parliament and political parties on the political agenda. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation confirms that the two sets of questions form two distinct factors. The dependent variable which is used for the analysis in Table 5 is calculated by subtracting the score on the political agenda-setting scale from the score on the media agenda-setting scale (M = 0.39, SD = 0.82).

14. The position of each country is based on the perceived influence of the media and of political actors on the political agenda in each country (see note 13).

15. Van Aelst and Walgrave (2011) studied the agenda-setting perceptions of MPs in Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden. The relative agenda-setting power ascribed to different actors by MPs is highly similar to our findings, both within and across countries. For example, like Swedish journalists, Swedish MPs are more likely to agree with the statement that ‘it’s the media which decide which issues are important’ than their colleagues in Denmark, Belgium and The Netherlands (see Table 2). In absolute terms, MPs generally perceive the media as more powerful than political journalists do.

16. The horizontal debate function is particularly important in Mediterrean countries, including Spain, where newspapers are mainly read by political and urban elites (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 22 and 96). Newspapers also have an important horizontal debate function in the United Kingdom, with its sharp divide between quality and tabloid newspapers (Tunstall 2004) and the important role of journalists working in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in the political process (Davis 2007).