Ministers may be powerful policy initiators, but they are not equally powerful. Cabinet control mechanisms have become a crucial part of cabinet governance, which can serve to contain agency loss and consequently constrain ministers in the policymaking process. However, empirical studies have not focused on the impact of such control mechanisms on individual ministers’ political outcomes. I turn attention to certain cabinet committees as intra-cabinet control mechanisms and argue that members of these enjoy a policymaking advantage compared to nonmembers. Analyzing ministers’ number of laws proposed to parliament in Denmark from 1975 to 2022, I look beyond parties as unitary actors and provide evidence for this causal relationship. Membership of the Economic Committee increases ministers’ legislative activity. Thus, even within parties in cabinet, ministers have unequal possibilities to act as policy-seeking. These findings offer new insights into political parties in governments, cabinet governance, policymaking, and legislative processes.

What makes immigration a salient issue among Latinos? We focus on immigration – one of the most pressing issues facing the United States (US) – and evaluate the factors that motivate immigration salience among Latinos over several election cycles. Although immigration policy has been linked with the Latino electorate over the period of our study due to high foreign-born rates and mixed-status families within this community, immigration policy has actually not been the dominant issue for the majority of Latino voters over this time period. Using survey responses from the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections, we test multiple theories of issue salience by exploring social, political and individual determinants of policy salience among Latino voters. We find that in addition to nativity, consumption of ethnic media and group identity are associated with reporting immigration as a salient issue. These findings provide a valuable addition to literature of public opinion on immigration and the origins of policy issue salience among ethno-racial minorities in the US.

What explains why the United Nations Security Council meets and deliberates on some armed conflicts but not others? We advance a theoretical argument centred on the role of conflict externalities, state interests and interest heterogeneity. We investigate data on the Security Council's deliberation on armed conflicts in the 1989–2019 period and make three key findings: (1) conflicts that generate substantive military or civilian deaths are more likely to attract the Security Council's attention; (2) permanent members are varyingly likely to involve the Security Council when their interests are at stake; and (3) in contrast to the conventional wisdom, conflicts over which members have divergent interests are more likely to enter the agenda than other conflicts. The findings have important implications for debates about the Security Council's attention, responsiveness to problems and role in world politics.

This paper traces the political development of Congressional gun control issue framing (with a specific focus from the early 1990s to the present), demonstrating that there have been two primary contexts in which gun control policy has been debated over this time frame: as a component of general crime control and as a specific response to mass shooting events. It identifies the primary historical, political, and electoral forces shaping the gun control debate in a given period while distinguishing the critical changes that drove the evolution from a crime control to a mass shooting focus. It assesses the degree of policy coherence and electoral salience specific to each context, illuminating why “gun control as crime control” had bipartisan Congressional support in the early 1990s and identifying what comparative disadvantages hinder the mass shooting focus of the present while also recognizing that the latter unfolded against a backdrop of heighted partisan polarization. The paper concludes that although one cannot compare the crime control and mass shooting framing contexts in a political vacuum, the electoral implications particular to each are relevant for understanding legislative action or inaction in Congress over the past thirty years, if more so in some periods than others.

This article explores the politics of policy change by focusing on agenda setting through the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA), which has been travelling to ever-larger geographies. We aim to produce signposts for future case studies of policy change by bringing together insights from MSA and New Institutionalism. We ask: Which institutions should we focus on when studying agenda-setting politics in different geographies? How do these institutions shape MSA’s structural elements – problem stream, policy stream, political stream, policy windows, and policy entrepreneur? In answering these questions, we hope to weave not only formal but also informal institutions into MSA’s backbone more tightly. We bring together diverse case studies that are sufficiently abstract and whose findings travel easily across other institutional contexts. We revisit the structural elements of MSA and illustrate how key formal and informal rules structure the politics in these structural elements.

To what extent can presidents exert gatekeeping power in opposition-led legislatures? Drawing on a study of roll rates in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, where presidents lack legislative majorities and often face a legislature controlled by the opposition, this article argues that gatekeeping power is divided among multiple actors. It finds that presidents exert weak gatekeeping power over the agenda. While presidents and their parties are rarely defeated in votes related to presidential initiatives, they generally create stable, informal coalitions with opposition parties to pass their bills. Moreover, the agenda-setting power of the president and the president’s party is weaker with bills that originate in the legislative branch, where the party is occasionally rolled on legislative initiatives and during the amendment stage if it is not also the median party.

At the Arctic Council’s Ministerial Meeting in Reykjavik on 20 May 2021, Russia assumed the chairmanship of the council for the second time since its establishment in 1996. Though some Russian analysts and practitioners were skeptical about the usefulness of such a mechanism during the 1980s and 1990s, Russia has become an active contributor to the progress of the Arctic Council (AC). Russia’s first term as chair during 2004–2006 led to the creation of the Arctic Contaminants Action Program as an Arctic Council Working Group. Since then, Russia has served as co-lead of the Task Forces developing the terms of the 2011 agreement on search and rescue, the 2013 agreement on marine oil spill preparedness and response, and the 2017 agreement on enhancing international scientific cooperation. Russia also has participated actively in the creation of related bodies including the Arctic Coast Guard Forum and the Arctic Economic Council whose chairmanships rotate together with the chairmanship of the AC. Now, far-reaching changes in the broader setting are posing growing challenges to the effectiveness of these institutional arrangements. The impacts of climate change in the high latitudes have increased dramatically; the pace of the extraction and shipment of Arctic natural resources has accelerated sharply; great-power politics have returned to the Arctic foregrounding concerns regarding military security. Together, these developments make it clear that a policy of business as usual will not suffice to ensure that the AC remains an important high-level forum for addressing Arctic issues in a global context. The programme Russia has developed for its 2021–2023 chairmanship of the council is ambitious; it proposes a sizeable suite of constructive activities. In this article, however, we go a step further to explore opportunities to adapt the Arctic governance system to the conditions prevailing in the 2020s. We focus on options relating to (i) the AC’s constitutive arrangements, (ii) links between the council and related governance mechanisms, (iii) the role of science diplomacy, and (iv) the treatment of issues involving military security. We conclude with a discussion of the prospect of organising a heads of state/government meeting during the Russian chairmanship as a means of setting the Arctic governance system on a constructive path for the 2020s.

This study examines attributes associated with U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Omar's unique intersectionality of identities as a Black, immigrant, Muslim woman presents a rich case study for an examination of attribute agenda setting. A sample of Tweets, all Wall Street Journal articles referencing the congresswoman, and Google searches were obtained for the hashtags (“IlhanOmar,” “GoBack,” and “WelcomeHome.”) from May 2019 to January 2020. The Tweets and articles were then coded for a variety of dimensions. Analysis of the frequencies of words associated with the coding and the hashtags showed that the majority of the messages were negative despite the hashtag for which they were collected. A cross-correlation time series analysis showed that articles and editorials published by the Wall Street Journal predicted spikes in Google searches and Twitter messages. This article pinpoints underlying sociological phenomena about the representations of gender, race, religion, and immigration status to show the arguments that link attributes of Ilhan Omar together on Twitter.

Traditionally, scholars argue that the committee structure is central to the policymaking process in congress, and that those that wield the gavel in committees enjoy a great deal of influence over the legislative agenda. The most recent iterations of Congress are more diverse than ever before. With 55 members—of whom, five chair full committees and 28 sit atop subcommittees—the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is in a place to wield a significant leverage over the legislative agenda in the 116th Congress. However, noticeable proportional gains in minority membership in Congress have yet to produce sizable policy gains for the communities they represent. An examination of bill sponsorship from the 103rd–112th congresses reveals underlying institutional forces—i.e., marginalization and negative agenda setting—leave Black lawmakers at a distinct disadvantage compared to their non-black counterparts. Bills in policy areas targeted by the CBC are subject to disproportionate winnowing in congressional committees. Unfortunately, a number of institutional resources often found to increase a bill's prospects—including placements and leadership on committees with jurisdiction over policy areas of interest—are relatively ineffective for CBC members looking to forward those key issues onto the legislative agenda.

What factors influence agenda setting behavior in state legislatures in the United States? Using the localized effects of climate change, we examine whether notable changes in temperature can raise the salience of the issue, thus encouraging a legislative response. To evaluate the behavior of individual legislators around climate policy, we utilize an original data set that includes geographic mapping of climate anomalies at the state legislative district level and incorporates individual, chamber, district, and state characteristics to predict climate bill sponsorship. Using a multilevel model that estimates climate change bill sponsorship among 25,000 legislators from 2011 to 2015, we find a robust relationship between temperature anomalies and bill sponsorship for Democratic members of state legislators while Republicans are unresponsive to such factors. Our data and methodological approach allow us to examine legislative action on climate change beyond final policy passage and offers an opportunity to understand the motivations behind climate innovation in the American states.

Following the financial crisis, the United Kingdom introduced major structural reforms to address concern about Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) banks, while France and Germany adopted much weaker reforms. This is puzzling given the presence of large universal banks engaged in market making activities in all three countries, which suffered significant losses during the international financial crisis, and given the commitments to reform made by political leaders in all three countries. The paper explains this policy divergence by analysing how dynamics of agenda setting contributed to the emergence of policy windows on structural reform. We explain the United Kingdom's decision to delegate the process to an independent commission as an example of venue shifting which helped to insulate the process from industry framing, and resulted in “conflict expansion” by mobilizing a wider coalition of actors in support of bank ringfencing. By contrast, in France and Germany the agenda was tightly managed through existing institutional venues, enabling industry to resist the framing of the issue around TBTF and limiting the role of non-business groups—a process we label as “conflict contraction.” We argue that analysis of agenda setting dynamics provides new insights into the cross-national variability of business power.

A comparative analysis of emotional taxation was conducted to investigate the affective cost of entering the political process among 1,019 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) activists in the United States (n = 355), the United Kingdom (n = 230), South Africa (n = 228), and Australia (n = 206). Four consistent trends were identified across these four contexts, with important implications for the study of social movements, youth activism, gender, sexuality, and race. First, levels of emotional taxation resulting from LGBTQI activist work were consistently very high. Second, emotional burdens were systematically greater for young, nonwhite, and transgender activists. Third, emotional taxation was compounded for activists whose identities crossed multiple marginalized groups. This finding supports the validity and importance of intersectional approaches to LGBTQI issues. Fourth, the sources of emotional taxation varied greatly among activists, and transgender activists were particularly stressed by public engagements such as major events and marches. Transgender nonwhite activists also indicated relatively high levels of emotional stress related to online forms of engagement, such as posting on Twitter and Facebook. These findings could help identify the kinds of activists who participate, the kinds of issues advocated for, and why certain tactics are used.

Normative democratic theory requires political actors in parliament and government to represent not only the citizens’ policy preferences, but also their issue priorities. This article investigates Italian dynamic agenda representation – the transmission of public priorities into the policy priorities of the Italian political system. To assess the public’s policy priorities, data on the Most Important Problem from the Eurobarometer polls are used, while the legislative agendas of the members of parliament (MPs) and government are built following the rules of the Comparative Agendas Project. The results of longitudinal analyses across 10 policy areas and 20 semesters (2003–13) suggest a persistent link between the public’s agenda and the prioritization of legislation by the Italian parliament, majority MPs, and government. Contrary to expectations, the opposition does not seem to be responsive to public opinion policy problems when introducing bills.

There is a growing scholarly consensus that Latin American regionalism has entered a new phase. For some observers, the increasing complexity of regional cooperation initiatives renders collective action ineffective. For others, the creation of new schemes signals a “posthegemonic” moment that has opened a space for collaboration on social issues. Both camps attribute this shift to the absence of the United States and the presence of left-leaning governments. By contrast, this study demonstrates that this agenda is not new, nor has the United States impeded similar initiatives in the past. In fact, the United States was instrumental in expanding regional cooperation on social issues in the early twentieth century. Instead, this article argues that agenda shifts are best explained by an evolving consensus about the role of the state. The “new agenda” is in line with historical attempts by governments to use regionalism to bolster their own domestic reforms.

Election-oriented elites are expected to emphasize issues on which their party possesses ‘issue ownership’ during campaigns. This article extends those theories to the content of executive and legislative agendas. Arguing that executives have incentives to pursue their party’s owned issues in the legislature, it theorizes three conditions under which these incentives are constrained: when governments are responsive to issues prioritized by the public, when a party has a stronger electoral mandate and under divided government. The theory is tested using time-series analyses of policy agendas of US congressional statutes and State of the Union addresses (1947–2012) and UK acts of Parliament and the Queen’s Speech (1950–2010). The results offer support for the theory, and are particularly strong for the US State of the Union address, providing insights into institutional differences. The implications provide reassurance concerning the conditions under which governments focus attention only on their partisan issue priorities.