This study examines interest groups’ influence on the European Commission’s policy agenda. We argue that organizations can gain agenda-setting influence by strategically emphasizing different types of information. Analyzing a novel dataset on the engagement of 158 interest groups across 65 policy issues, we find that prioritizing information about audience support is more advantageous than emphasizing expert information. However, the effectiveness of highlighting the scope of audience support depends on the level of issue salience and degree of interest mobilization. Specifically, our findings indicate that when dealing with issues characterized by quiet politics, there are no systematic differences among groups employing distinct modes of informational lobbying.

What has caused the marked, cross-national, and unprecedented trends in European electoral results in the 21st century? Scholarly explanations include social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We argue that these electoral changes more proximally result from public issue salience, which results from societal trends and mainly affects rather than is caused by party agenda setting. We use aggregate-level panel data across 28 European countries to show that the public issue salience of three issues—unemployment, immigration, and the environment—is associated with later variation in the results of the conservative, social democrat, liberal, radical right, radical left, and green party families in theoretically expected directions, while the party system issue agenda has weaker associations. Public issue salience, in turn, is rooted in societal trends (unemployment rates, immigration rates and temperature anomalies), and, in some cases, party agenda setting. We validate our mechanism at the individual-level across 28 European countries and using UK panel data. Our findings have implications for our understanding of the agency of parties, the permanency of recent electoral changes, and how voters reconcile their social and political worlds.

Japan has experienced many of the factors associated with populism, but has not experienced an upsurge of populism in national-level politics. We posit that the dominant frames in the Japanese print media coverage of populism form a crucial and overlooked part of the explanation for the absence of populism. Our qualitative human-coded analysis of quality and tabloid coverage demonstrates that overall, the Japanese newspapers act as gatekeepers and set an agenda that is unfavorable for right-wing populism. The press engage in ‘media populism’ and frame populism – and alternatives to the status quo more generally – as a threat. Moreover, the print media are not hostile to immigrants in ways that populists could leverage.

Interest groups cannot advocate on every issue they might consider relevant. They must decide what issues to prioritise and which ones to leave to one side. In this article, we examine how groups seek to balance different internal and external considerations when prioritizing issues, and which factors might explain variation in the relative strength of these drivers. We integrate data of a survey of national interest groups in Australia with findings from interviews with a cross section of high-profile groups. While the literature often suggests a clash between external political considerations and internal membership demands, we find that groups view these drivers as largely compatible. Our explanatory analysis points to the policy orientation and insider status of the group, its democratic character, and the extent to which it faces competition for membership contributions, as important factors shaping the relative strength of distinct drivers of internal agenda setting.

This article uses John Kingdon’s multiple streams framework as an analytical tool to consider how the policy issue of ‘job quality’, in the guises of ‘decent work’ and ‘fair work’, developed a ‘career’ in Scotland between 2013 and 2017. The aim is to understand why, despite the efforts of a variety of policy entrepreneurs and the openness of the Scottish Government to this policy problem, job quality did not arrive on the Scottish Government’s decision agenda. The article finds that the crucial ‘policy window’ did not open due to the 2016 ‘Brexit’ decision dramatically changing the political landscape.

The article demonstrates the applicability of Kingdon’s framework for agenda-setting analysis in a parliamentary environment and constitutes a rare application of the framework to a ‘live’ policy issue.

The authors were involved in a research and advocacy project on ‘decent work’ that was undertaken in Scotland during 2015 and 2016 and therefore were amongst the policy entrepreneurs seeking to place job quality on the Scottish Government’s agenda.

Within the context of the economic downturn in southern Eurozone countries and the imposition of new constraints on national policy-making, this article examines the congruence between party issue prioritization, during and after the electoral phase. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of four countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) and use of party manifesto and parliamentary question data. We found that between the electoral and parliamentary arenas, parties tend to emphasize different issues. However, this occurs in different ways across time, countries, and parties. We propose a measurement of issue congruence in agenda framing between the pre- and post-electoral phases to assess to what extent elections provide a guide for public policies. Moreover, we propose arguments to explain different results in the analyzed countries and across parties. We show that the crisis magnified the capacity of the opposition to maintain programmatic coherence – a helping hand for opposition parties (including the radical ones) that succeeded in boosting the relevance of their signature issues.

Social media in China has not only become a popular means of communication, but also expanded the interaction between the government and online citizens. Why have some charitable crowdfunding campaigns had agenda-setting influence on public policy, while others have had limited or no impact? Based on an original database of 188 charitable crowdfunding projects currently active on Sina Weibo, we observe that over 80 per cent of long-term campaigns do not have explicit policy aspirations. Among those pursuing policy objectives, however, nearly two-thirds have had either agenda-setting influence or contributed to policy change. Such campaigns complement, rather than challenge existing government priorities. Based on field interviews (listed in Appendix A), case studies of four micro-charities – Free Lunch for Children, Love Save Pneumoconiosis, Support Relief of Rare Diseases, and Water Safety Program of China – are presented to highlight factors that contributed to their variation in public outcomes at the national level. The study suggests that charitable crowdfunding may be viewed as an “input institution” in the context of responsive authoritarianism in China, albeit within closely monitored parameters.

Policy agendas studies analyse the dynamics of attention to policy issues over time and across actors and institutions to obtain insights into the functioning of political systems. The articles in this special issue draw on this approach to investigate key aspects of the Italian political system, with a special emphasis on the period spanning from the political crisis of the early 1990s to the watershed elections of 2013. They analyse a broad range of institutional and policy venues, including public opinion, political parties, the executive, the Parliament, and the Constitutional Court. While single articles address different research questions and focus on different institutions, they all share a focus on the dynamics of issue attention over time. This introduction provides a summary overview of the theoretical and methodological tools employed in the volume, highlighting how the study of policy agendas can contribute to the understanding of political systems and their change over time. It then summarises the main findings of single articles which, taken together, shed new light on several classic questions that have been widely debated in the literature on the evolution of the Italian political system.

In the agenda-setting process, prior to the decision-making process, there is a predecisional process whereby some issues are systematically blocked by powerful actors from being placed on the formal agenda. These issues are termed “nondecisions”. This article argues that the predecisional process exists not only at the issue level but also at the level of problem definitions. Because of the empirical challenge of studying problem definitions that are not on the formal agenda, the article suggests examining problem definitions that were on the formal agenda and then disappeared from it. Such problem definitions can be termed nondecisions when their disappearance is due to latent power mechanisms, such as anticipated reactions or information control. The article tests these arguments using two American policy cases: prescription drug prices and child care. In so doing, it sheds light on the predecisional process and expands our understanding of the politics of problem definitions.

Italy is one of the most representative ‘new immigration countries.’ Between the 1980s and the 1990s, it became a major country of destination for immigrants coming from Asia, Middle East, and North Africa. As a result, since the mid-90s, immigration has gained salience within the Italian political debate. Building on the existing literature on agenda-setting and framing studies, this article studies the evolution of the immigration issue in Italy over the last two decades. It focuses on the framing and, more specifically, the position political actors tend to adopt when debating on immigration. In particular, the main research questions are: to what extent is the framing of immigration associated with the traditional left vs. right spectrum? Do incumbent political parties tend to adopt a different position toward immigration than opposition parties? This article analyses party competition dynamics over the immigration issue in Italy from 1995 to 2011. The author carried out a political-claim analysis of articles from two Italian national daily newspapers. Findings show that immigration is more a positional issue than a valence one. Political actors’ positions towards migration appear to be anchored to the old left vs. right dimension of the political conflict. This demonstrates that parties’ engagement within the political conflict goes beyond electoral campaigns. Finally, being in government seems to play a crucial role in ‘softening’ the way party actors frame immigration, in terms of both the arguments used and the pro- or anti-immigration positions adopted.

This article analyses the transmission of policy priorities from electoral campaigns to legislative outputs under different institutional configurations. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the article tests whether a mandate effect exists, if incumbents also uptake the priorities of their competitors, and whether and how the introduction of alternation in government impacts on these dynamics. The analysis relies on data sets of the Italian Agendas Project recording the issue content of party manifestos and laws and covering the period 1983–2012. The results of time series cross-sectional models lend support to the presence of a mandate effect in Italy, a mechanism which was strengthened after the introduction of alternation in government. Opposition priorities may have an impact on the legislative agenda, but mostly when considering the legislation initiated in Parliament. Our findings have important implications for the understanding of the impact of government alternation, an institutional feature underlying – with varying intensity – most democracies, on the functioning of democratic representation.

This study offers the first systematic analysis of the impact of press-state relations, or media systems, on the HIV/AIDS news agenda in African news coverage. The premise is that media systems play a determining role in the degree to which journalists can independently advocate for social change when covering HIV/AIDS. Drawing on comparative research, four sub-Saharan countries were categorized into two media systems: Contained Democratic (South Africa, Nigeria) and Repressive Autocratic (Zimbabwe, Kenya). A sample of HIV/AIDS stories (n = 393) published from 2002–2007 in each country's leading Anglophone newspaper was content analyzed. Across all coverage, the topic of social costs was framed more for the responsibility borne by nongovernmental agents than governmental agents. In Contained Democratic media systems, however, story emphasis shifted toward government agents taking responsibility for addressing the social costs of HIV/AIDS. Prevention campaigns were framed more as progress than decline across all newspapers; however, campaigns were reported as being more efficacious in Contained Democratic systems than in Repressive Autocratic systems. No impact of media system on framing of medical developments was found. Results show the value of comparative analysis in understanding the agenda-setting process: with greater emphasis on positive efficacy and government initiative, the news agenda in Contained Democratic media systems can facilitate stronger positive societal-level responses than the news agenda in Repressive Autocratic media systems.

This article demonstrates how party leaders (frontbenchers) and backbenchers use their access to UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to represent the policy agenda. Building on comparative research on parliamentary questions and agenda-setting as well as taking account of the particular context of PMQs, we argue that party leaders and followers draw attention to different kinds of policy topics with the express purpose of influencing the government. Based on a content analysis of over 9,000 questions between 1997 and 2008, we demonstrate how the posing of questions affects subsequent agenda, varying according to whether questions come from the front or backbench, from government and opposition and from different parties. The findings demonstrate that PMQs helps both the opposition and backbenchers draw attention to issues that the government and opposition party leadership does not always wish to attend to.

Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament, this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’ organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.