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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.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Dominik Gerber and four student coders for their research assistance, and Simon Hug for his methodological help, and the JEPP referees for their helpful suggestions. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Comparative Agendas Project in Reims.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Pascal Sciarini is Professor of Swiss Politics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Anke Tresch is Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne and Head of Political Surveys at FORS, Switzerland.
Notes
1. On the one hand, the Swiss government system tends towards separation of powers system, and grants MPs with powerful agenda-setting and control instruments over the executive. On the other hand, in the Swiss ‘militia’ parliament MPs’ involvement is part-time and incidental to a professional activity, and MPs lack resources.
2. On the subtopic level, macroeconomics includes redistributive issues such as fiscal and monetary policy, as well as industrial policy. Agricultural policy is also very much oriented towards redistribution (subsidies for farmers), regulation and protection, which justifies collapsing agriculture with macroeconomics.
3. The Chamber to which its author belongs must approve a postulate, whereas both Chambers must approve a motion or an initiative.
4. While analysing only one quality paper may be seen as a limitation, it has been demonstrated that different media largely influence each other in terms of which issues to cover. This effect is known as intermedia agenda setting (e.g., McCombs Citation2005). As a result, the issue agendas of different media are often highly homogeneous (for the U.S., e.g., Vargo and Guo Citation2017; for Spain, e.g., Baumgartner and Chaqués Bonafont Citation2015; for Belgium, e.g., Vliegenthart and Walgrave Citation2008).
5. Several agenda-setting studies assess the media’s issue priorities with respect to all news items regardless of the foreign or national scope of the news and without any closer reflection about the likely consequences of this choice (e.g., Vliegenthart and Walgrave Citation2011b).
6. In the robustness test section we present the results of an additional model including the 4769 foreign news appearing on the front page of the NZZ (according to the editorial line the front page has until recently reported on international politics only).
7. In order to ensure reliability, student coders were trained by a master coder and participated in several pre-tests. Inter-coder reliability tests were conducted all along the coding process, and always exceeded 0.7 (Krippendorf’s alpha), which is acceptable given the complexity of the codebook.
8. Some studies have chosen weeks as time units, but eventually included four to five week lags in their estimations (e.g., Green-Pedersen and Stubager Citation2010; Vliegenthart and Walgrave Citation2011b). Moreover, breaking down the analysis to weekly observations results in many zeros (Van Noije et al. Citation2008).
9. For symbolic interventions the number of months is 61, since during a given month with a parliamentary session no question or interpellation was introduced.
10. We carried out panel unit root tests and found no problem of non-stationarity: For all models and regardless of the test we apply, the null hypothesis that panels contain unit roots is rejected.