Where does agenda-setting collide?

In mass communication research, agenda-setting names the way the news media shape which issues the public comes to think are important. McCombs and Shaw's 1972 study The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media compared the issues a group of undecided voters called important with the issues the news had covered, and found the two rankings closely matched. Their claim was that the press may not tell people what to think, but it does tell them what to think about, by making some topics more salient than others. Later work added a second level, in which the media transfer not only the salience of an issue but the salience of its attributes, the particular features and frames through which the issue is seen; McCombs reviewed that line in his 2005 article A Look at Agenda-setting: past, present and future. The object here is the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda, studied by comparing coverage with opinion, and it is a claim about public perception rather than about government action or formal voting.[1][2]

Unit

The match between what the news covers and what the public thinks is important

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Comparing the ranking of issues in news content with the ranking of issues in public opinion surveys

In political science and public policy, agenda-setting names the stage of the policy process at which some problems, and not others, gain the serious attention of government. The question is not what the public happens to notice but which issues officials take up for possible action, out of the far larger set of problems that could in principle be addressed. Kingdon's 1984 book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies described this through three streams, of problems, policies, and politics, that must join at a window of opportunity for an issue to rise. Baumgartner and Jones's 1993 Agendas and Instability in American Politics reported that policy attention tends to sit still for long stretches and then shift abruptly, a pattern they called punctuated equilibrium. The object here is the governmental agenda, the short list of matters actually under consideration, which is a different thing from the salience of an issue in the public mind.[3][4]

Unit

The set of problems currently receiving serious attention from government

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Tracing which issues appear on legislative, executive, and hearing agendas over time, and how attention shifts

In social choice theory, agenda-setting, often called agenda control, names the power that comes from deciding the order in which options are put to a vote. When a group chooses among options that vary in more than one dimension and votes on them in pairs, majority preferences can cycle, so that almost any outcome can be reached by arranging the sequence of comparisons the right way. McKelvey's 1976 paper Intransitivities in multidimensional voting models and some implications for agenda control proved this result and drew out its implication, that whoever sets the agenda can in principle steer a majority to a chosen result. The object here is a property of a voting procedure, established by mathematical proof rather than by survey or case study, and it concerns control over a sequence of decisions rather than the visibility of an issue or its place on a government's list.[5]

Unit

The leverage a procedure gives to whoever orders the votes

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Formal proof about how a voting rule behaves, not empirical measurement