What will gain the system’s attention? “Explores the dynamics of a broad range of policy issues in different countries . . . an important scholarly contribution.” —Political Studies Review Before making significant policy decisions, political actors and parties must first craft an agenda designed to place certain issues at the center of political attention. The agenda-setting approach in political science holds that the amount of attention devoted by the various actors within a political system to issues like immigration, health care, and the economy can inform our understanding of its basic patterns and processes. While there has been considerable attention to how political systems process issues in the United States, Christoffer Green-Pedersen and Stefaan Walgrave demonstrate the broader applicability of this approach by extending it to other countries and their political systems. This book brings together essays on eleven countries and two broad themes. Contributors to the first section analyze the extent to which party and electoral changes and shifts in the partisan composition of government have led—or not led—to policy changes in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and France. The second section turns the focus on changing institutional structures in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Canada, including the German reunification and the collapse of the Italian party system. Together, the essays make clear the efficacy of the agenda-setting approach for understanding not only how policies evolve, but also how political systems function.

Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on “balloon boy?” With Making the News, Amber Boydstun offers an eye-opening look at the explosive patterns of media attention that determine which issues are brought before the public. At the heart of her argument is the observation that the media have two modes: an “alarm mode” for breaking stories and a “patrol mode” for covering them in greater depth. While institutional incentives often initiate alarm mode around a story, they also propel news outlets into the watchdog-like patrol mode around its policy implications until the next big news item breaks. What results from this pattern of fixation followed by rapid change is skewed coverage of policy issues, with a few receiving the majority of media attention while others receive none at all. Boydstun documents this systemic explosiveness and skew through analysis of media coverage across policy issues, including in-depth looks at the waxing and waning of coverage around two issues: capital punishment and the “war on terror.” Making the News shows how the seemingly unpredictable day-to-day decisions of the newsroom produce distinct patterns of operation with implications—good and bad—for national politics.

Legislatures are arguably the most important political institution in modern democracies. The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, written by some of the most distinguished legislative scholars in political science, provides a comprehensive and up-to-date description and critical assessment of the state of the art in this key area.

Using a unique dataset spanning fifty years of policy-making in Britain, this book traces how topics like the economy, international affairs, and crime have shifted in importance. It takes a new approach to agenda setting called focused adaptation, and sheds new light on key points of change in British politics, such as Thatcherism and New Labour.

Setting the agenda for parliament is the most significant institutional weapon for governments to shape policy outcomes, because governments with significant agenda setting powers, like France or the UK, are able to produce the outcomes they prefer, while governments that lack agenda setting powers, such as the Netherlands and Italy in the beginning of the period examined, see their projects significantly altered by their Parliaments. With a strong comparative framework, this coherent volume examines fourteen countries and provides a detailed investigation into the mechanisms by which governments in different countries determine the agendas of their corresponding parliaments. It explores the three different ways that governments can shape legislative outcomes: institutional, partisan and positional, to make an important contribution to legislative politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, legislative studies/parliamentary research, governments/coalition politics, political economy, and policy studies.

This book summarizes recent advances in the work on agenda-setting in a comparative perspective. The book first presents and explains the data-gathering effort undertaken within the Comparative Agendas Project over the past ten years. Individual country chapters then present the research undertaken within the many national projects. The third section illustrates the possibilities and directions for new research in comparative public policy using the data presented in this book. All the data used and discussed in the book is moreover publicly available. The book represents a significant contribution to the study of comparative public policy. By introducing a unified research infrastructure it opens up new possibilities for both empirical and theoretical research in this area.

Why do public issues like the environment rise and fall in importance over time? To what extent can the trends in salience be explained by real-world factors? To what degree are they the product of interactions between media content, public opinion, and policymaking? This book surveys the development of eight issues in Canada over a decade -- AIDS, crime, the debt/deficit, the environment, inflation, national unity, taxes, and unemployment -- to explore how the salience of issues changes over time, and to examine why these changes are important to our understanding of everyday politics. Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada offers one of the first empirical analyses of the interaction of the media, the public, and policymakers in Canada and, more generally, makes an important contribution to the study of political communications and policymaking well beyond the Canadian context.